If your pharmacy still relies on manual purchasing processes, you’re probably losing time and money to inefficient processes that bog down staff and impact patients.
The purchasing ecosystem seems like it’s designed to be complicated and opaque. And pharmacies already face challenges such as finding staff and drug shortages. That’s why you owe it to yourself and your team to leverage every advantage.
Best-in-class purchasing automation harnesses the power of advanced technology to enhance your purchasing process and optimize purchasing management services. Your pharmacy leverages a single accurate and efficient solution for purchasing management that opens up strategies to save more and work smarter while ensuring compliance.
SureCost just published a white paper, The Case for Best-in-Class Purchasing Automation and Five Ways to Achieve It. This blog post gives you a preview of that paper, looking at some of the challenges affecting pharmacies and how best-in-class purchasing automation helps you overcome them. For the complete strategy plus implementation steps, we encourage you to download the full white paper.
Placing Purchase Orders
To stay competitive, “purchasing automation” has to mean more than using electronic tools for procurement. Even if you’re not literally using pen and paper to submit orders, it’s probably up to you, a designated buyer or several members of your team to compare multiple catalogs online that are constantly being updated. Then, you’re selecting, clicking and sending orders through separate purchasing interfaces.
Whether you’re buying from multiple vendors or just one wholesaler, it’s never clear if you’re finding the best purchasing option: the lowest cost, the highest reimbursement, compliant items, etc. There’s simply too much data.
Best-in-class purchasing automation gives pharmacies a unified solution for automatically comparing purchasing options and placing POs from all their trading partners. You stop juggling multiple screens to compare prices across catalogs or categories, and you cut through the data clutter to automatically find the best option.
Our white paper explains other advantages, such as integration with your inventory so that past volume informs the quantity you order. Download it now to see how best-in-class purchasing also helps you unlock new savings opportunities, ensure primary vendor compliance and gain back time and energy to spend with patients.
Receiving Items
Unfortunately, receiving items can be as “manual” as it gets: physically removing items from a tote one at a time, visually inspecting them against a packing list or invoice and checking or crossing off each one to confirm it’s the right product—hopefully at the right quantity for the agreed-upon price. Some wholesalers provide an electronic receiving tool for their products. But that’s just for their products. What about purchases from other vendors? Does it also check what you ordered—the price you expected to pay—against what you received?
The number of hours you spend on receiving may vary. But the monotony is constant. And that combination of time and tedium leads to manual errors.
Best-in-class purchasing automation simplifies receiving. Just scan the item using your mobile device (not a clipboard or pricey third-party equipment). You instantly check the product, quantity and price. It’s an efficient, accurate and convenient process that lets you get back to serving patients. And you can make sure you always get precisely what you ordered.
Stop losing time on outdated receiving or retrofitted technology that’s not optimized for pharmacy receiving. Download our white paper to see how best-in-class purchasing automation can make receiving easy and efficient.
Reconciling Invoices
Unfortunately, traditional invoice reconciliation buries many pharmacies under paper, numbers and emails. After going through the exercise of manual receiving, you now have to post possibly hundreds of products from multiple invoices to Accounts Payable. And you want to capture all the information right down to shipping costs, taxes and credits.
If you’re using the right software to do this, or if that tool isn’t optimized for your pharmacy, it’s too much data to consistently and accurately track for every item and transaction.
Take the headache and uncertainty out of reconciliation. Find a solution that integrates with Accounts Payable and provides a “three-way match” between purchasing, receiving and accounting. That means easily confirming purchases at each step: from the initial PO right up to sending payment for that product, with all data flowing through to Accounts Payable and documentation and reporting available at each stage.
Learn More
This blog post shared just a few benefits. Our white paper shows you how best-in-class purchasing automation acts as your pharmacy’s:
- Source for the best purchasing options from all vendors
- Hub connecting all purchasing processes and relationships
- Catalyst for efficiency that streamlines your work
- Flexible support empowering and unburdening staff
- Optimizer for relationships with primaries, GPOs and other partners
Download the white paper and learn what makes best-in-class purchasing automation the missing piece of your pharmacy purchasing puzzle. Then, book some time with us. Let's discuss how to make best-in-class purchasing automation work for your pharmacy.
