Expatriate Healthcare Category Procurement Intelligence Report

The market for Staff Medical Care and its sub-segments such as Expatriate Healthcare are at an interesting intersection. With the influx of millennials in the workforce and increasing diversity at the workplace, companies are struggling to design pay and benefits processes that are uniformly relevant for the lifestyles of such diverse groups.

People analytics has emerged as a rather new branch of HR function with an aim to gain deeper insights into an employee's behavior, motivators, risk of attrition and general wellbeing. There is a high demand for suppliers who can integrated technology in traditional processes to generate insights on the buyers' talent pool.

New locations and vendors are emerging as cost effective suppliers of Expatriate Healthcare, offering an opportunity to widen the supplier base and gain further negotiation leverage with incumbent suppliers.

Trends like these and many others discussed in this report are necessitating a relook at the way Expatriate Healthcare is procured and the procurement cost saving opportunities that exist.

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 Expatriate Healthcare. To help quick decision making, this report advises on several procurement best practices that have worked well for category managers.

For example, Buyers can achieve cost savings by bundling procurement of various personnel-related services (e.g. benefits administration, payroll, time and attendance, and HR management functions). The integration of different HR functions leads to the automation of employee data across various verticals. The integration also reduces the burden of manually entering and updating necessary information and offers consistency and accurate tracking across multiple systems.

Employers are focusing on providing employee-friendly interfaces (such as mobile-enabled services and web portals) to access and manage benefits and options available to employees. Suppliers who have the technical capabilities to seamlessly integrate with the employer's internal systems without comprising the data protection should be preferred.

Large organizations are opting to streamline and centralize their personnel-related administration functions at the global level to realize efficiencies and consistency in the employee benefits and related policies.

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