A recent article over on Fierce Healthcare on how strategic procurement can maximize M&A benefits noted that consolidating procurement can slash costs by standardizing purchasing processes and taking advantage of volume discounts for supplies because a smart business buying strategy involves using one technology platform for purchasing a wide variety of products from multiple sources.

The healthcare sector has also been ripe with M&A over the past few years, with $13 Billion in revenue now required to be a top 20 healthcare system, as many systems have grown significantly as a result of inorganic M&A growth over the past few years. According to the article, the recent M&A activity has been characterized by cross-geography deals designed to create value by scaling investments in platform capabilities across digital, analytics, shared services and workforce management.

But Procurement can find more value beyond shared products, shared supply base, and shared systems.

As hinted in the article, Procurement can also:

• identify opportunities for shared services across the merged companies:
  this can allow for service provider contract consolidation and renegotiation for better rates
• better workforce management:
  Procurement can help analyze the workforce needs across the proposed combined organization to better reallocate workforce needs (and possibly reduce the need for outsourced services)

But it doesn’t have to stop there.

An organization spends money across:

• employees
• contractors
• facilities
• utilities
• products
• systems

Procurement can help identify opportunities across each of these.

In other words, don’t overlook:

• facilities:
  maybe you can reduce the number of locations through relocation of some personnel, and even reduce the overall cost through better facility identification
• utilities:
  some states have energy deregulation, and there is significant opportunity in telco (like SaaS)
• software: well beyond the S2P tools

Anywhere money is spent, Procurement can help provide an objective, fact-based view — not just on product-based spend.