Distributors and manufacturers may both pay administrative fees to GPOs based on sales for contracted products. Calculating and reporting these fees can be a complex, time-consuming process for the suppliers, because each GPO has traditionally asked for different data in different formats.
“This new toolkit will help improve pricing accuracy by encouraging all GPOs to accept one format for administrative fee reports, rather than each requesting sales information from suppliers using different formats. Adopting a standard will create efficiencies for contracted suppliers to create the reports and for GPOs to process them, thereby removing operational costs for these organizations,” said Melanie Proctor, Sr. Director, Supply Chain Master Data Management, Premier.
The participating organizations in the pilot say they currently spend about one full day a month organizing administrative fees. “We have relationships with 18 GPOs and each month we have to generate about up to 12 different formats for reporting,” said Jim Burns, Regional Sales Manager with HD Supply. “It will be immensely helpful when we can move to one, thanks to this new toolkit.”
This new standardization was unveiled at HIDA’s Contract Administration Conference, an annual working event driving standardization and best practices in pricing accuracy.