Avalon Health Care manages 55 health care facilities in many western states and has over 330 people buying supplies for its facilities. The company was in need of new procurement system that was more efficient and user-friendly. After the first year of a new system, the company has saved about $1 million in procurement costs while expediting purchasing and reducing the need for full-time support.
The VP of Procurement at Avalon Health Care explained that they’ve been able to stay under proposed procurement budgets, mostly because of the ability for department managers to immediately compare spending requests against available funds in spending plans.
The new software enables department managers see how many units of such higher-priced items as wheelchairs or medical walkers are already in stock, which prevents unnecessary purchases.
According to Kirton, since switching to the e-procurement system in the summer of 2012 Avalon, which provides out-of-hospital services including skilled nursing, pharmacy and assisted living care has saved nearly 50% of its annual spending on housekeeping supplies and saved about $1 million in the first year.
Other benefits include the ability to speed up the approval process and send purchase orders to vendors. Companies can also use the software to allow the buyers to “punch out” to the e-commerce site operated by an approved vendor, looking at pages full of detailed information on the products. When clicking through to get a product, the transaction is sent back to the procurement system for purchasing approvals.
Coupa Software provides the procurement services in a SaaS model.
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