Overview of the Healthcare Industry
The healthcare industry includes doctors, hospitals, and public and private establishments providing remedial, diagnostic, preventive, and therapeutic services. This sector also includes health insurance firms and medical equipment and pharmaceutical manufacturers. A few trends impacting the growth of the healthcare industry include the development of expensive clinical innovations, the rise in the amount of aging population, growing prevalence of chronic diseases and comorbidities, increasing patient awareness, expectations, and knowledge of healthcare services.
Let’s look at some of the fundamental factors that are expected to influence the growth prospects of the healthcare industry in the coming years.
- Value-based procuring: Healthcare industry firms must determine their tolerance for risks across the supply chain and device sourcing risk strategies to achieve value-based procurement models and gain a stronger foothold in this industry space.
- Providing higher value at lower costs: In present day’s competitive scenario delivering higher value to the customer at lower costs contributes to significant growth and performance improvements in the healthcare industry. As a result, global firms operating in the healthcare industry space must strive to create a better procurement system that provides higher quality services at lower costs.
These factors are compelling firms operating in the healthcare industry to leverage the use of strategic sourcing analysis studies. These solutions assist businesses in generating optimal sourcing and procurement methods and measurement tools to drive savings across the supply chain. Furthermore, to speed up the procurement process and ensure the healthcare industry can achieve substantial profits is only possible by making use of strategic sourcing solutions.
The Business Challenge and Journey
The client is a leading firm in the healthcare industry space. The company’s revenue was driven by channel partners. As a result, they were on a constant lookout for innovative methods to incentivize their channel partners. The client also wanted to identify the right vendors and reduce procurement spends. They also wanted to balance the focus between the strategic aspect and the transactional part of procurement with an aim to achieve long-term benefits.
To provide the client actionable insights into the category and various opportunities to help them apply best practices, the strategic sourcing specialists at SpendEdge tailored an integrated research approach. The integrated approach included primary and secondary research methodology coupled with qualitative and quantitative data collection procedures.
During the course of this strategic sourcing analysis engagement the healthcare industry client developed a catalog to help reduce maverick spend; increase the visibility of marketing and procurement teams as well as the suppliers, and define clear lead times for any future procurement activities.
Key questions answered in this strategic sourcing analysis engagement
The Results
This strategic sourcing analysis engagement helped the healthcare industry client reduce time and energy spent on transactional activities. They also gained insights into the long-term price validity with clauses to absorb currency fluctuations. Through this engagement, the client also achieved a total cost savings of 14%.