Catheters Market Procurement Intelligence Report

Business practices within Catheters market are heavily influenced by changing trends across the category as well as within the broader Medical and Surgical Equipment and Supplies market. Companies that serve multiple markets are increasingly facing the dynamism in regulatory frameworks across countries. Coupled with increased costs across the value chain, suppliers are hard pressed to alter their business models and pricing structures to remain relevant in the market.

Despite increasing costs on almost all fronts, suppliers are resisting a drastic price increase due to intense competition where market players are willing to increase their market share at the cost of profitability. Therefore, buyers can expect pricing status quo in most cases, or only negligible to marginal price increases in some cases.

Over the years, regional boundaries have blurred as suppliers foray into different continents, increase their capital expenditure and spend on cross-border M&A initiatives. The deployment of geographic diversification strategies through such consolidation initiatives has enabled the large suppliers to improve their performance and expand their business footprint.

As a result, category managers need to closely monitor the Catheters procurement trends and identify changes required in their procurement environment for the category.

It has become imperative for category managers to remain as agile as possible in terms of their procurement practices. However, it is not always easy to quickly spot and implement alternative practices in a category like Catheters. To help quick decision making, this report advises on several procurement best practices that have worked well for category managers.

For example, Investing in benchmarking studies help category managers enhance their knowledge about market pricing or billing rates based on job roles and functions. This allows them to not only save costs but also negotiate with suppliers. For example, while negotiating on rates of bundled services, buyers can save significantly on a single service by cross verifying the rates quoted by suppliers against industry benchmarks.

Buyers should look to minimize the contract-related risks where unfavorable credit terms may severly penalize buyers for delayed payments or entitle the supplier to demand pre-payments or shorten the payment terms. Although these clauses are not very common in the category, suppliers may still insist on them, especially in situations where buyers' liquidity or financial health is in question.

Before engaging in a contractual agreement with suppliers, buyers should focus on identifying and understanding various critical parameters along with their impacts on different procurement models.

Catheters procurement managers also need to proactively identify and mitigate potential risks that can arise in the supply chain or contracts for Catheters procurement. Some examples include: