Healthcare providers manage thousands of contract renewals per year. Just one renewal slipping through the cracks could mean significant financial penalties, or critical patient services not being available.
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Many healthcare providers employ reactive tactics to renew contracts on an ad-hoc basis. However, this manual, time consuming, and omni-directional strategy doesn’t ensure the continuous availability of services that patients need. But there’s a better way.
Manual contract management, financial penalties, and supply chain disruption
Automatic renewal workflows based on ERP data, triggered escalations, and templated communications
Less manual contract management, fewer unplanned expirations, and consistent item delivery
We recommend using Salesforce Service Cloud as the primary escalation, automation, and communication engine for contract management. Why? Because Service Cloud's declarative workflows, communication templates, and ease of ERP integration are ideal for automating contracts.
Ideal contract management processes aren't reactive, because finding contracts that are about to expire is an omni-directional tactic. By measuring renewal activity, including last response, number of emails, amount of responses, and response time, we can leverage this data to automate contract escalation – and eliminate financial penalties and supply chain disruptions.
As a result, contract management starts with creating personas, permissions, and roles. These include:
Service Cloud's Lightning Flow allows us to configure a contract lifecycle. First, we create a contract object that stores a variety of data points about each contract. Data points are flexible, but could include dates, deliverables, SLAs, terms, conditions, parties, signatures, and more.
In the Lightning Flow, we create a variety of contract stages. At a minimum, this flow includes:
These stages can be configured with their own instructions, data points, and more to ensure all details are collected at the right time.
Suppliers often offer rebates when providers reach order thresholds. By creating fields for rebates on a supplier or contract object, we can ensure stakeholders across the supply chain team are given visibility into what rebates are available, when they expire, and how close they are to reaching thresholds. Rebates on the contract object can be referenced on the supplier or product views, giving cross-functional visibility. As a result, finance, procurement, and administrative teams can work together to achieve significant cost savings.
Because contract expiration and engagement history are stored on the contract object, a variety of Salesforce flows can be written to auto-escalate contract renewals at the right time. Additionally, alerts and emails can be enriched with the relevant calls to action, powered by ERP data, that enforce the proper action to be taken – both by internal teams, and external suppliers.
In order to enable supply chain, clinical, and financial leadership with the right data to drive better decisions, we configure a standard dashboard that contains:
This dashboard helps stakeholders across procurement, finance, and administration assess the health of your contracting process.
Ensure internal and external contract communications are timely and relevant
Retain all of your most important data in a centralized record-of-truth
Ensure the continuity of contracts and prevent supply chain disruptions