8 Benefits of eProcurement for Healthcare Companies

July 24, 2023 by Medigroup

For healthcare companies, the procurement process can be a major headache. However, with recent advances in eProcurement, businesses can reduce or eliminate many of the time-consuming, difficult tasks that make the process a hassle.

In this article, we go over some of the most important benefits of switching to eProcurement for your healthcare business. You’ll find eight different ways using digital solutions for procuring products can help your business reach new heights.

The Biggest Benefits of eProcurement for Healthcare Companies

These days, almost every person and every business buys at least some of the products they use online. That’s because the online model has become fast and easy to manage and is generally much more efficient than buying products through traditional channels. Why should your healthcare company be any different?

For companies like yours, eProcurement offers a wealth of benefits. Some you may already know about. Others may surprise you. All in all, there are eight benefits of eProcurement that stand out as great reasons to consider switching to this new and improved way of getting what you need.

1. Streamlined Client Management

Client management is a chore in any business, but perhaps more in healthcare than in most industries. With lots of clients and accounts to keep track of, managing everything is time-consuming and often confusing.

With eProcurement, all your client’s accounts can be managed digitally in one place. This allows you to easily check in on payment status, reach out to clients, and enforce compliance. Platforms for eProcurement even allow you to automate many of the processes to save you even more time and effort.

2. Simplified Ordering Process

With the old-fashioned way of procuring products, companies often have to communicate with multiple vendors through several different channels. This adds a great deal of time and requires tons of coordination to do correctly.

But with an eProcurement solution, you can handle the entire ordering process through a single interface. These tools can help you identify vendors, check supply and lead times, pay for orders and more. As a result, you’ll no longer need to spend work hours going back and forth between bills, catalogs, records, and other items to order everything you need.

3. Integrated Accounting

One of the biggest benefits of eProcurement is that it takes much of the manual work out of accounting. Rather than spend time moving financial data and records from one place to another, digital platforms let you import that data quickly and easily. Some platforms even do some bookkeeping tasks for you.

This reduces the amount of time your financial team spends doing basic tasks. But it also reduces chances for costly accounting errors. Without the need to go from paper records to digital, or even from a spreadsheet to your accounting software, there is opportunity to miss a decimal point here or input the wrong information there.

4. Reduced Redundancy

Redundancy is a major pain point for healthcare businesses. When your procurement process still involves many manual tasks, it’s easy to order things you don’t need or already have. That’s especially true if you have multiple people as part of the process.

But with eProcurement, you can quickly check your current inventory and orders to see what you have and what you have on the way. As a result, you’ll be able to spot a redundant order before finalizing it and avoid spending money and resources you don’t need to.

5. Improved Vendor Relationships

Like with most businesses, relationships in the healthcare industry are critical to success. When you spend time sending emails back and forth or sorting things out over multiple phone calls, it’s easy for relationships with vendors to become strained.

Those relationships can get much easier when you switch to eProcurement. Rather than work out specifics with individual people, you can do most of the work online without having to talk directly to your vendors. This frees you up to focus on building the relationship while the nuts and bolts are taken care of for you.

6. Advanced Transparency

Another massive benefit of eProcurement is the more efficient and more accurate record keeping it offers. When all of your procurement transactions and other records are stored in a single place, it’s easy to see who did what, when.

That increased transparency can help you identify the source of problems quickly and get to solving them. Mistakes are easy to spot and bad actors have a much harder time concealing actions that could hurt your company.

7. Expanded Collaboration

With much of the busy work taken out of the equation, it’s easier for your employees to find ways to work together. The additional time and capacity frees them up to think of new ideas and communicate things other than the task at hand.

Using an eProcurement solution also removes parts of the process that can cause friction between workers. The simplified and streamlined ordering process means less chance of miscommunications and errors that can easily turn into the blame game.

8. Boosted Efficiency

The final benefit, but perhaps the biggest, is the massive overall efficiency boost that your business gets from switching to eProcurement. Moving to a digital procurement process can greatly reduce the time you spend on one of your central functions. By cutting down on the chance for errors, you also cut back on how much time you spend fixing problems that could have easily been avoided.

All of this adds up to more time and more clarity for you and your business. It also means far less frustration and hassle.

Benefits of eProcurement: Conclusion

What would you do with your business if you had a few extra hours every week? Where would you take it? What new opportunities would you be free to explore?

You can’t add time to the day, but you can cut back on how much time you spend doing the things that make your business run. With an eProcurement solution, you can get that time back and free yourself and your employees up to work on your business, and not just for it.