December 8, 2022 – While there is much industry emphasis on the value of collaboration between providers and suppliers, tangible value and benefit from collaborations are already being realized today at Allina Health with help from a segmentation approach that centers on how best to manage these relationships.
For the last few decades, the powers of “company to company” strategic relationships in all industries have been well documented and written about in many publications. Long embraced by suppliers in major markets, strategic relationship development or customer relationship management (CRM) programs are often started by companies with the use of “customer segmentation” models that organize key customers into groups or segments. Suppliers can then develop targeted programs and strategies that seek – for each segment of customers – to:
- Learn about their customers on a deeper level
- Tailor their content to the unique needs/challenges of each customer segment
- Create targeted messaging that will resonate with each segment
- Improve their customer service, loyalty, and support efforts
- Find new opportunities for sales and products
The Harvard Business Review has published extensively on this topic, including a 2008 article by Vantage Partners entitled “From Vendor to Partner: Why and How Leading Companies Collaborate with Suppliers for Competitive Advantage.” The article explains the emerging concepts involved with supplier relationship management (SRM) – including the segmentation of suppliers into categories that foster better tracking, analyzing, and utilization of each supplier, based on value, capabilities, and contributions. So, while “customer segmentation” has long been practiced by healthcare suppliers, the similar practice of “supplier segmentation” is currently being embraced by select healthcare provider organizations with advanced chief supply chain officers.
Allina Health, a not-for-profit health care system that serves more than 16.7 million people in Minnesota and western Wisconsin through operating 12 hospitals and more than 100 specialty care sites, has a maturing corporate supply chain program that recognizes that health systems simply do not have the resources to drive maximum value by themselves. “Competitive pricing and good products are important, but they are not enough in serving today’s competitive market,” says Tom Lubotsky, Allina’s Vice President of Supply Chain. “Healthcare systems today have to be more demanding than ever of themselves and their suppliers. We must all raise the bar.”
Read more in the latest issue of The Journal of Healthcare Contracting.