Healthcare providers coordinate thousands of interactions every year between hundreds of stakeholders just to maintain supplier relationships. These manual processes cause back orders, past due purchase orders, and guarantee mismanaged returns.
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Reactive tactics to nurture supplier relationships aren’t enough. Manual, time consuming, and omni-directional strategies don’t ensure suppliers are managed in a manner that quickly procures quality supplies. But there’s a better way.
Limited visibility into supplier relationships, back ordered inventory, fragmented communication
Case queue management, automated follow-up for reviews, and triggered communications
Improved forecasting, collaborative relationships, and faster lead and response times
To start, we recommend using Salesforce Service Cloud as the primary automation, engagement, and workflow engine for supplier management. Service Cloud's declarative workflows, communication templates, and shared dashboards help us create both high-level and granular visibility into each supplier.
Supplier management focuses on mutual success, as opposed to just cost reduction. By improving communication, shared efficiencies can be achieved that benefit both suppliers and providers. Efficiencies can be measured in terms of patient outcomes, reliability, and cost efficiencies.
As a result, supplier management starts with creating personas, permissions, and roles. These include:
Service Cloud's versatile object model allows us to group suppliers into unified profiles. This means that all data related to a supplier – including products, purchase orders, contracts, SLAs, and communication history – is accessible from one place. This allows supply chain teams to collaborate with each supplier more effectively.
We configure alerts with Service Cloud flows that notify users of potential disruptions in the supplier relationship. This allows key stakeholders to react to issues, such as back orders or recalls, with substitutions or additions. Substitutions or additions can be subsequently routed to value analysis teams (VAT) in order to expedite approval and minimize any disruption to patient care.
Service Cloud's communication engine allows the procurement team to engage the supply chain with timely, relevant messages that speed up response times. Triggers based on timelines, milestones, and actions mean that manual effort is minimized with templated emails containing ERP data attributes and relevant calls to action. Additionally, auto-escalation ensures that dispute and return-to-vendor (RTV) management is streamlined.
Every communication is centrally stored on the supplier object, allowing for engagement patterns to be audited.
Service Cloud's chat functionality empowers committee members with a chat function on each supplier. This allows all stakeholders to quickly ask clarifying questions, voice concerns, or add context to supplier relationships.
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 assess the how collaborative, reliable, and supportive suppliers are, empowering leaders to choose relationships that maximize innovation, patient safety, and value.
Ensure internal and external communications are timely, relevant, and value-driving
Retain all of your most important data in a centralized record-of-truth
Ensure collaborative relationships that create value, produce innovation, and lower costs
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