The Specialized Healthcare Department (SHD) is an administrative department responsible for overseeing public sector tertiary healthcare facilities, hospitals, and medical education institutions. Among its responsibilities is the management of the bulk procurement requirements of all the entities under its administrative purview.
SHD is responsible for consolidating the procurement requests and annual procurement plans of the entities, bundling them together into bulk requests, and tendering them out for competitive bidding. The SHD is also responsible for sourcing, cultivating, and onboarding qualified and reliable suppliers and vendors to meet the annual procurement requirements.
The complex technical specifications and quality standards required of medicines and drugs, medical devices and equipment and other medical supplies necessitates careful scrutiny of companies interested in becoming approved suppliers to the department. Suppliers also need to be onboarded and ramped up on the public sector procurement rules and procedures they need to follow to participate in open public bidding.
Traditionally, the SHD had leveraged a large team of procurement officers who would utilize templatized documents and complex forms to have suppliers sign up and submit documents and evidence through which they could be scrutinized. The evaluation process comprised (1) collating the submitted evidence and ensuring completeness, and (2) reviewing the submitted evidence to ensure compliance. This required a force of 16 procurement officers, nearly 20% of the total staff strength of the department.
The SHD required a straightforward solution to minimize the manhours required in the process of screening suppliers and to streamline the onboarding procedure to reduce in-person support to suppliers.
Proqura's Supplier Management Module enabled SHD to set up supplier screening and evaluation forms that would enable suppliers to easily register and submit their credentials and documentation for review.
Proqura's guided forms were easy for suppliers to use and enabled SHD team members to minimize their work in collating and screening documents.
Annual renewals of supplier qualification could be easily set, saving time and management overhead by automating this process. And linking the supplier registry with the actual performance of the supplier enabled SHD to maintain accurate supplier scoring through the year for more informed supplier assessments.
