One primary benefit of e-procurement solutions is spend management. It’s the bottom line of what drives leaders of healthcare organizations to pursue automated solutions for their procurement processes and spend. Here are 10 primary cost-reduction benefits of e-procurement, from good outcomes that can happen right away to the kind of long-term impacts that drive successful forward-looking businesses.
10 Ways to Reduce Costs with eProcurement
- Find and eliminate duplicate spending.
E-procurement’s capability for identifying and flagging duplicative spend is the low-hanging fruit of cost-savings solutions. Healthcare organizations can start seeing immediate savings and save themselves the time and effort of recouping excess spend. - Save expenses from manual systems.
Many organizations that have recently grown still rely on manual, paper-driven procurement systems that might (emphasis on might) have worked for one or two facilities but no longer make sense. Going digital means immediate savings in paper, postage, and workforce hours lost to tedious processes. - Leverage data and reviews.
E-procurement opens doors immediately into one-click access to spending patterns and top financial outlays. Pulling automated reports from centralized invoices gives the finance office unprecedented insights into where the most money is going—and which adjustments can have the greatest impact on the bottom line. - Manage vendor relationships.
Vendor relationships in healthcare procurement are crucial. E-procurement systems enable more clear and direct understanding of the costs of goods and services, documentation of errors or duplications, and expectations for both parties. This is particularly vital in times of supply chain disruption. - Balance workforce and staffing. Automating and digitizing healthcare procurement can have a positive ripple effect through organizations. Productive individuals can be freed from manual tasks to make a greater impact. Stability can be achieved in times of short staffing or workplace churn. And the efficiencies of e-procurement can have a positive effect on morale and talent retention.
- Review contracts.
E-procurement collects purposeful data that can be leveraged into an invaluable contract review function. This leads to costs savings through compliance as well as potential areas of renegotiation. - Drive supplier accountability.
Healthcare organizations need to make sure they’re receiving the right goods and services at the right time and at the right location. E-procurement builds oversight and accountability into inventory and into every transaction. - Gain insight into spending trends.
With the right reporting, spending and budget trends become highly visible, and short- and long-term trends can be identified before excess spend gets out the door. - Make spending completely visible.
E-procurement is the greatest cure for the kind of unidentified, “rogue” spending that undermines budgets, forecasting, and the fiscal bottom line for companies that haven’t digitized processes. - Empower planning.
Leaders in healthcare procurement, and the enterprises they serve, can enjoy the benefit of mindful and intentional planning when costs are contained, and capital is freed up for expansion or investment in current facilities.
Looking to Reduce Your Annual Spend?
Procurement Partners helps healthcare organizations strengthen their supply chain operations while reducing annual spend by over 10%. As a leading healthcare supply chain software solution purpose-built for post-acute, non-acute, and continuum-of-care providers, the platform simplifies the procure-to-pay process. Users can place orders and process invoices for all suppliers through a centralized system. By automating procurement workflows, organizations report up to 40% time savings and 95% supplier contract compliance.
