The First Challenge: When my contracts change, my team can spend days updating each item in our purchasing system with the new pricing. The time lag can mean we send out POs at the wrong price and overpay for our purchases.

The Second Challenge: I use a third party spend analysis service, sending them my PO history each month and waiting for them to format and load it. When I see the analysis, it can be days or weeks old. The delay might lead to missing savings opportunities.

MediClick for Contracts & Analysis (C&A) integrates with healthcare’s major ERP systems through proprietary connector layers that pull your spend information for analysis and with no human intervention.

This integration enables C&A to fulfill three critical functions for you:

• Because C&A is able to keep a rolling twelve months of spend history, you get the most up to date, accurate analysis available based on a complete picture of file spend, non-file spend and non-PO spend. C&A automatically refreshes this information for you as often as every five minutes.
• When you receive a new contract or an update to an existing agreement, C&A passes your most current prices back to your ERP system so they can take effect as soon as the contract is active. This makes you the source of truth for pricing when your distributor or manufacturer charges the wrong price.
• Since C&A monitors all price changes, it alerts you if someone changed a PO price away from the contract price.

How C&A Integrates to Your ERP

Connector Layers

MediClick has leveraged expertise about each of the major ERP systems in order to create connector layers – mechanisms by which C&A pulls spend information for analysis and pushes back pricing in a secure, efficient, and automated manner. Once established in the implementation process, the connector layers require no maintenance from your IS department.

Pulling Spend Information from Your ERP

When the MediClick team implements C&A, the connector layer pulls key spend data from your ERP. This information represents all of your items and purchasing activities over the previous 12 months, including file spend, non-file spend, and non-PO spend.

C&A feeds the information through its data normalization process using MediClick’s Product Index Layer. This ensures that the information you maintain (probably weighted toward the distributor’s ordering requirements) matches up to the information in the C&A contract file (probably weighted toward the manufacturer’s item information). All of which leads to accurate price updates when C&A pushes new contract pricing back into your ERP.

Pulling this spend information enables C&A to identify what you’re buying off-contract versus on-contract and points you to the best opportunities for savings based on highest dollar spend.
C&A refreshes that initial 12 month spend data on an ongoing basis, as frequently as you choose – as often as every five minutes or as little as once a day. Once you set it, C&A’s connector layer automatically pulls the information from your ERP.

Ongoing updates mean C&A has extremely current information about your spending patterns, which allows it to immediately identify savings opportunities through C&A’s powerful analytical features.

Pushing Price Updates to Your ERP

Let’s say you’ve finished a long round of negotiating with coronary stent manufacturers, having finally selected your preferred supplier and agreed to pricing on the manufacturer’s full catalog. The pricing takes effect immediately, and (since it represents significant price reductions) you want to begin purchasing at the better price tomorrow.

C&A uses a simple template to import the items automatically and create a new contract. The system stamps the contract activation date as tomorrow, and at midnight uses the connector layer to push the new price for each item to your ERP. The update is automatic, and all purchase orders created tomorrow go out with the correct – better – contract price.

If the activation date is in two weeks, C&A pushes the new price over to your ERP in exactly two weeks. C&A keeps track of the timing so you can concentrate on other things. You can rest assured knowing the price will be correct on the activation date without any need for human intervention.

Maintaining Price Control

From a pricing management perspective, the frequent updates are critical. They make you the source of truth for all pricing and make sure you’re notified if anyone attempts to change the contract price you’ve sent to your ERP. If anyone overrides the contracted price for an item by accepting the trading partner’s price (via 832, 855, or a manual PO price change), this information is posted on the contract manager’s workbench along with the User ID of the person responsible.

The contract manager will always be able to see, at a glance, what’s happening with contract prices and take immediate corrective action when necessary.