The Challenge: Managing a procurement project is a complicated process. I have to manually create and send out RFPs, sift through the responses and create a contract for the winning bidder. I want one place to manage the RFP process from bid creation to clinical input to awarding the contract to tracking the savings.

MediClick for Contracts & Analysis (C&A)’s project management tool provides a centralized place to manage every aspect of putting a product line out to bid, including:

C&A’s project management tool takes a strategic sourcing manager or purchasing agent through a step-by-step process that turns your spend analysis into measurable action.

Step 1: Turn Your Analysis into a Project

Let’s say you’ve used the C&A Analysis Workbench to evaluate your spend on coronary stents. The results showed that you divided market share among three suppliers, none receiving enough of your business to give you favorable pricing.

You decide this should become a project. You click “Create Project” from the Analysis Workbench, name it “Coronary Stents” and move from the Analysis to the Projects area – from analysis to action — all within C&A.

Step 2: Generate the RFP

Within Projects, C&A generates a list of all the coronary stents you’ve purchased from the various manufacturers over the previous 12 months. The list includes your quantity of spend for each product. You have the option of excluding any item, adding new items, including non-file purchases, etc.

C&A lets you select which suppliers receive the RFP, and it automatically creates the document as a secured spreadsheet to send directly to your supplier contact. With it, you send a note to each bidder asking them to provide pricing based on an 80 percent market share.

Step 3: Compare Proposals & Engage Your Value Analysis Teams

Each supplier fills out the RFP and sends it back to you. C&A stores all correspondence and documents that you and the bidders exchange during the process, stamping and cataloging each communication for easy reference later.

Using a secure spreadsheet add-in, C&A’s auto-loads each RFP back into the system, which then evaluates each of the RFP responses against one another.

C&A then provides you with a side-by-side comparison of each option against your current pricing. It shows you who provides the best price for each item, whose product lines provides you the best coverage for the items you’ve put out to bid, and highlights which bid represents the best overall savings.

C&A shows you that each bid would provide you with significant savings based on moving the bulk of your market share — 80 percent – to one supplier. Choosing any of the proposals is a win for you, but one represents the largest cost reduction: more than $200,000. You’d like to see that happen.

You take this information to your value analysis team to get a consensus to move 80 percent of your market share to the supplier you’ve identified as providing the best cost reduction.

Step 4: Select Winner & Create Contract

You and your value analysis team have a consensus, deciding to award the business to the bidder that showed a $200,000 savings. C&A lets you automatically create a contract from that bid.

You create the contract, assign it a start date, and click “Create.” On the start date, C&A automatically updates all the item prices in your ERP system. The next purchase order that goes out the door will have the current contract price on it.

Step 5: Track Savings

When you awarded the bid, C&A took the anticipated savings and locked it in. Now, with each purchase of an item on that contract (or an item that has been replaced by the new contract), C&A tracks your actual savings against the estimate.

You invested a lot of time and energy in winning the best price, now it’s time to follow the savings. Learn how C&A tracks savings for you.