For practice owners who know their procurement could be smarter, but aren’t sure where to actually begin.
Search for ways to improve procurement at your veterinary practice and you’ll quickly find the same advice: set minimum stock levels, use your practice management software, build better supplier relationships. All valid. But most clinics skip a step that comes before any of it.
Before you can optimise anything, you need to answer one question honestly.
What happens to your procurement if the person who handles it isn’t there next week?
How procurement ends up with one person
In most clinics, procurement was never formally assigned. It landed with someone who turned out to be good at it, so it stayed there. She knows the suppliers, the discounts, the sales reps by name. She knows which products are cheaper direct from the manufacturer, which orders need to hit a minimum to avoid shipping fees, and which supplier you probably shouldn’t call on a Friday morning.
The standard advice is to appoint a dedicated inventory manager, train them properly, and document clear processes. That is good advice. It is also precisely what most small and mid-sized practices do not have. Simply because the practice was never set up that way.
What exists instead is one person who keeps on top of it. And when she goes on holiday, she tries to order ahead so as little as possible needs to happen while she is away.
Why that makes optimisation harder than it looks
There is little point in optimising a procurement process that lives entirely in one person’s head. Because then you are optimising her approach, not the practice’s.
Four places where this becomes concrete:
- Price comparison. The same product can vary significantly in price across suppliers. But whoever is placing the order rarely has time to check that every week. So orders go to whoever they always go to, even when another supplier would be cheaper.
- Promotions and volume discounts. Suppliers communicate offers through sales reps or newsletters. Anyone who is not actively tracking those will miss them. Not through carelessness, but simply because there is no system in place to catch them.
- Shipping costs. Many clinics hold off on orders until they hit the free-shipping threshold. But who is tracking that per supplier, and whether it actually works out every week? Usually nobody knows for certain.
- Visibility. How much are you spending per supplier? What do you order most? Where is margin being lost? Most practices cannot answer those questions. The information exists, but it is scattered across supplier websites, inboxes, and someone’s memory.
What optimising procurement actually means in practice
Most procurement advice assumes you already have visibility. Set restock levels. Compare suppliers. Analyse purchasing patterns.
But visibility is exactly what is missing.
The first step is not a new system or a new process. It is a question: is what we know written down somewhere, or does it only exist in one person’s head?
Once your procurement information, suppliers, terms, order history, lives somewhere the whole team can access, something shifts. Not who places the order, but how exposed the practice is if that changes. And only then can you make real decisions: which supplier is delivering the most value, where there is room to save, what could be done differently.
That is what optimising procurement looks like in a veterinary practice. Not more complicated. Just more deliberate.
Curious what your procurement looks like when you see it all in one place for the first time?
VetProcure is free for veterinary clinics. Connect your existing supplier accounts and see for yourself what becomes visible. No IT setup required, no commitment.
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