A heart has 4 hours between donation to transplant, anaphylaxis can occur within less than an hour, and cardiac arrest is fatal within 8 minutes. In a business where minutes – even seconds – can be the difference between life or death, delay can no longer be tolerated.
Yet, medical supply delays continue to plague hospitals. 69% of OR staff have reported delaying procedures due to supply constraints, with 40% outright canceling procedures. Worse, 27% have seen or heard of a patient being treated with expired products.
Without proper supply chains in place, hospital staff have to act independently to secure supplies. 64% of hospitals report hoarding devices or medicine – a calculated response to supply chain instability.
The cure: digitalization via e-commerce. Medical suppliers and manufacturers need to embrace a B2B-first e-commerce strategy that gives hospitals and medical buyers real-time stock and pricing visibility, smoothing supply chains and drastically reducing product shortages.
Buyers want reliability. Give it to them.
Research has shown that a majority of B2B buyers in all industries prefer online commerce due to its reliability and efficiency. For medical buyers, this makes sense: reliable procurement means reliable scheduling, fewer delayed procedures, and safer patients.
Complementing this stat, 75% of B2B buyers would choose a supplier who offers a superioronline buying experience. For medical buyers, where time and reliability are of the essence, every mismanaged order is a life on the line.
How does B2B-first eCommerce improve the procurement process?
Medical buyers are held up by challenges such as inaccurate pricing, stock levels, and order delays.
Here’s where B2B-first eCommerce comes in. By integrating directly with critical business logic such as ERP, this solution lets B2B buyers see stock levels, pricing, previous invoices, and order updates with complete accuracy – enabling more efficient and reliable ordering.
For medical suppliers, providing this real-time accurate data to buyers can alleviate procurement uncertainty, allowing for consistent long-term planning.
Medical-first eCommerce features
Medical-first eCommerce does more than reduce supply chain bottlenecks; it provides key features that solve buying challenges endemic to both buyer and supplier.
Documentation
No industry may be more documentation-critical than medical buying. Getting the correct product, knowing the specific components, having the right dose, and adhering to proper implementation is absolutely critical.
With ERP-integrated eCommerce, sellers can easily provide full documentation including product manuals and pharma leaflets, while buyers can upload their own certifications to personalized buyer portals.
This transparency gives buyers the confidence to make streamlined purchases without bogging down sales teams, speeding procurement.
Personalization
A joint report out of Adobe and Forrester shows that 66% of B2B buyers want a fully personalized buying experience. For medical buyers, this means not only personalized catalogs with custom products that reflect agreed upon prices, but also digital commerce platforms that are in full compliance with regulations – territory by territory.
Online sales portals – a key feature in B2B-first eCommerce – provide medical buyers with a fully customized buying experience that meets all compliance and regulatory standards.Buyers can access personalized catalogs replete with product documentation, place orders at agreed upon prices, generate subscription orders, check order status, and initiate returns — all without leaving the online sales portal. Account hierarchies make it easy to restrict permissions and bake in authorization processes for orders – ensuring each medical order is in full compliance with the respective territory’s laws.
Cases in point: AOSS and Fagron
No doctor would accept a cure without evidence. Here are the highlights from two successful cases of digital transformation in the medical field:
AOSS medical supply, which specializes in the plasma and dialysis industry, has a catalog of over 20,000 products with 4,000 approved vendors.
As many of their products are perishable, they require a low-maintenance, buyer-personalized eCommerce solution that meets trade agreements and government regulations. By choosing an ERP-integrated e-commerce solution, they rolled out a modern B2B-first web shop tailored for the intricacies of medical supply – in just 140 days.
With zero downtime and personalized catalogs complete with full product documentation, buyers completed purchases seamlessly, saving sales teams 100 hours a month on manual order entry and customer support.
Fagron, an R&D medical company specializing in customized medication, needed an efficient, easy-to-manage eCommerce portal that allowed for rapid global scalability – meaning content localization, documentation support, and regulation compliance within each region it operated.
Fagron chose an e-commerce solution that natively integrated with their ERP, enabling buyers to easily access information and documentation with realtime accuracy. This out-of-the-box support with minimal customization enabled Fagron to open 14 international stores – 12 of which were within a year’s time.
Ultimately, 40% of sales are now made online, with buyers getting full product + stock transparency and accuracy at time of purchase, ensuring that customized medications reach patients in need on time and at appropriate measurements.
Don’t leave medical supplies up to chance
The risks of an unregulated medical supply chain are dire: delayed procedures and dangerous outcomes. Medical suppliers have a responsibility to their buyers and patients to inject much needed reliability into supply chains by embracing digitization and online commerce. Digital evolution increases efficiency for buyers and sellers, ultimately securing a safer, healthier outcome for patients whose lives are on the line.
Arno Ham is E-commerce Evangelist at Sana Commerce, a commerce platform that’s engineered for B2B.