Free Custom «The Procurement» Essay Paper

Procurement stipulates activities to buying of goods and services for a certain business entity. Again, a crucial administrative task is the use of reduction of cost and long-term tactical techniques to control the outgoing expenses. The organization has to assess different suppliers in order to ensure that the patient record system supplied is of quality standards in patients care, i.e. meets the user requirements and objectives of the organization. A procurement officer has to follow various guidelines in order to ensure that the patient record supplied meets the requirements of the users before he shortlists the suppliers.

One of the activities that the procurer should collect is the entire information concerning the potential bidders who are willing to supply the system (Bhote, 1987). Such kinds of information are financial situation, background of suppliers, and the key personnel. Secondly, the procurer should request for supplier qualification whereby the supplier qualification and capabilities are gathered. The intention of requesting this information is in order to formulate a list of pre-qualified suppliers.

 

Type of service

Type of assignment

Title of your paper *

Academic level

Pages

Timeframe

Spacing

Currency

  Order now

The procurer evaluates and ranks the suppliers and creates a list of pre-qualified suppliers. The suppliers should submit documentation containing their information, such as experience of the patient record system, reference provided from other customers for similar work, financial capability, pricing of the patient record system, verification of the applicable licences and certificates, health, safety policies and staff training. The next step involves the request for the supplier quotation. This is where only the supplier identified through the request for information will be requested to respond to the original competition (Moser, 2006). Again, it is in this process where the unqualified suppliers shun the expense and the effort of preparing a comprehensive reasonable response. The typical result of this procedure is a favourite supplier list.

To determine if a potential supplier is an approved national health service he or she must complete a quotation form. The minimum of three quotations will be sought where the market permits. Again, a potential supplier must complete a tender package containing all his financial stability, background of his supply and competence to take the identified product among others. One of the methods of determining what the integrated software application for patient records management is required to have is through software testing, which involves software validation and verification (Shen, 1996). The importance of this is to ensure that doctors can fast access both the current and historical patient records. It also protects the patient information with the role-based security adapted to each employee’s responsibilities and roles.

The best selection criteria to follow are to evaluate the past performance and previous experience of the goods or services purchased. Secondly, evaluate the relative level of sophistication of the quality system, i.e. regulatory requirements. Assess on whether the potential supplier is capable of meeting the potential and current capacity requirement. Next, assess on the supplier financial stability. Assess on his or her technical support availability. Evaluate on the total cost of dealing with the supplier. Finally, assess on the total cost assessment of the entire transaction. Based on the background and experience in the supply chain, the quality-based and price quality would be the best approaches (Office, 1993).

The contrasting thing between these two approaches is that the supplier is selected on the base of product quality unlike the price quality where the supplier is selected on the base of the price. The comparison of these approaches is that they both are involved in the cost reduction. Again, they are used to encourage suppliers to deliver their products. The strength of the quality-based approach is that the supplier is selected based on the quality of goods and services. However, the disadvantage is that he considers quality as the crucial factor ignoring other factors. The strength of the price quality approach focuses on the quality of price and ignores other factors, such as quality of the product (Andrew, 1998). As an experienced procurer, the quality based approach would be the best because the patient wants a system that captures all the requirements effectively and efficiently. To narrow the list of the suppliers to three, the best mechanism to use is assessing on the qualification, requesting for a formal quote, visiting the supplier by management, and collecting their information with other customers served by the supplier. Through consideration of these factors, one would finally eliminate to three potential suppliers.