Whether your biotech company has a hundred employees or a thousand employees, there are basic things you’re buying—like software licenses and laptops—that could likely have better contracts and pricing. Without procurement as a strategic function of your company or an extension of your company, you’re unlikely to get those gains.
People often think, “Well, I buy things at home, buying it for the company is no different,” or, “I have to agree to their terms and conditions and pricing.” None of that is true. And that’s where bringing in procurement specialists alongside your biotech team can help.
Strategic Sourcing Experts Add Immediate Value
When procurement experts work hand-in-hand with business leaders across functions, critical marketplace intelligence is leveraged to immediately deliver value. Expert category intelligence builds a framework within the company that ensures you’ve got the right supplier contracts with the right language and the right KPIs. That’s why you hire an attorney who specializes in a specific area of the law. That’s why you go to a neurologist instead of going to a general internist if you’re having severe headaches. And when you’re sourcing or buying products or services, you hire a procurement specialist.
Within biotech companies there are numerous spend categories, it is imperative to know what terms and conditions are favorable within a spend category to properly protect your company. Procurement specialist consultancies like Matchbook, bring the critical sourcing expertise to speed timelines, minimize opex and maximize productivity. As a startup, it is impossible for biotechs to know everything about all spend categories. Leveraging Matchbook’s category expertise, provides access to experts who have been buying in your key spend categories for years and is essential to ensuring your company is protected.
Procurement Policy Ensures Checks and Balances and Contract Optimization
Procurement category specialists can teach and instill a buy-smart mentality into your organization’s culture through procurement policy and clearly outline who can sign contracts to ensure that your company has checks and balances to optimally leverage buying power. Ideally, you might want preferred suppliers for specific categories. And, a non-negotiable is having a a competitive bid policy and a spend threshold policy with appropriate segregation of duties. For example, if you only have one quote for a product, you may think that quote is terrific; however requiring three quotes before award, may be best for specific spend categories or spend thresholds. Having the right checks and balances—the marketplace intelligence—as a benchmark, is critical to know that you’re not getting taken to the cleaners.
Policy does not have to be a bad thing. It can be guard rails and guidance, but it is to protect the longevity and the financial stability of your organization.
Biotech rarely has procurement as a function within the organization; they are lean by design to focus on speeding research and development and optimizing the go-to-market strategy for their portfolio. Hiring specialized procurement consultants like Matchbook that know the different hooks and opportunities across different categories is the key to getting the intelligence and negotiation skills you need. You don’t get what you don’t ask for, and there is always negotiation leverage: you do not have to pay retail or agree to boilerplate contracts.
Contact us today to discuss how Matchbook can become an extension of your biotech team.