Christoph Marr, Managing Director, Marr Procurement Limited
Many care providers still face crippling cost pressures from a combination of downward fee income pressure, aged debt and supplier inflation. The principal supply side cost pressures are from staffing, temporary labour agencies, property, food and energy. To make matters worse, this is not a new problem, cost pressures have been building for years and spiked during the last three years. For most care operators, the current level of cost pressure is unsustainable and many are now dipping into reserves.
There is a solution which, when delivered in the right way, cuts costs and protects the quality of care and indeed continuity of care. In this article we will explore innovative approaches to procurement, specifically for care providers, providing suggestions for how care providers can cut costs without compromising on quality of care.
Marr Procurement is the leading, values-led social care procurement partner known for integrity, fairness and quality. Marr Procurement has worked with over sixty care providers across the UK to reduce operating costs across all goods and services, including £523m of temporary labour agency spend. Marr Procurement is also the exclusive procurement partner for the Voluntary Organisation Disability Group, Care England, the National Care Forum, the Registered Care Provider Association, the Association for Real Change and the Care Innovation Hub.
We will now explore how best to cut costs for social care providers, without compromising on quality.
If you decide to deliver your own procurement programme there are three simple steps to take. Key is to start by understanding what is needed by the business, then via a professional sourcing or tender process find the right supplier. The best way then to ensure the promised savings don’t disappear, is to ensure there is effective supplier and contract management in place. We refer to this as the ‘Find, Get, Keep’, cyclical sourcing process.
The benefit of a good procurement programme can be quick, material and is achievable without compromising on care or quality. Such benefits include a lower operating cost, an improvement in service quality by re-investing savings into better care; reduced supply chain risk; a rationalised supply base; more consistent quality; more efficient internal proceses, eg consolidated invoicing, fewer internal approvers and fewer suppliers to manage. The graph below shows real and audited savings which were achieved across multiple spend categories with Marr clients.
Lets say you like the idea of delivering real cost savings but you don’t have the time to run your own, in-house procurement programme, what then? Help is at hand. At Marr Procurement, this is what we do for care providers every day. We deliver savings which stick to the P&L across all areas of spend from temporary labour to food, from insurance to property, all of which are auditable.
In terms of innovation, during the Covid crisis the team at Marr thought it would be a good idea to make the suppliers of over 200 sourcing projects, accessible via a buying website. So for time pressed care providers who need peace of mind over all purchasing decisions and who want value for money, marrgo, is the Marr Procurement easy-to-use website which is a trusted source of hand-picked suppliers combined with the reassurance of a robust control framework. This means, by buying goods and services via marrgo, the Marr Procurement team deliver all the sourcing work, the tender work, contracts management and supplier management so that you enjoy the output of a professional procurement function without all the hassle.
Using marrgo means you have a clear approval process built in, a weekly budget control function and complete peace of mind because your teams have access to only the approved, competed and carefully managed suppliers. Using marrgo also means your team no longer need to access many supplier portals; with marrgo, it’s a one-stop-shop.
Image depicts Christoph Marr, Managing Director, Marr Procurement Limited