Purpose

Procurement professionals widely use purchasing portfolio models to tailor purchasing strategies to different product groups’ needs. However, the application of these approaches in hospitals and the impact of a pandemic shock remain largely unknown. This paper aims to assess hospital purchasers’ procurement strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic, the effects of factor-market rivalry (FMR) on strategies and the effectiveness of purchasing portfolio categorizations in this situation.

Design/methodology/approach

This qualitative study of hospital purchasing in the Netherlands is supported by secondary data from official government publications. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 hospital purchasers at large hospitals. An interpretative approach is used to analyze the interviews and present the results.

Findings

The findings reveal that product scarcity forces purchasers to treat them as (temporary) bottleneck items at the hospital level. The strategies adopted largely aligned with expected behavior based on Kraljic’s commodity management model. Adding the FMR perspective to the model helped to further cluster crisis strategies into meaningful categories. Besides inventory management, increasing supply, reducing demand and increasing resource coordination were the other common strategies. An important finding is that purchasers and governments serve as gatekeepers in channeling FMR, thereby reducing potential harmful competition between and within hospitals.

Social implications

The devastating experience of the COVID-19 pandemic is unveiling critical weaknesses of public health-care provision in times of crisis. This study assesses the strategies hospital purchasers apply to counteract shortages in the supply chain. The findings of this study emphasize the importance of gatekeepers in times of crisis and present strategies purchasers can take to assure the supply of resources.

Originality/value

No research has been conducted on purchasing portfolio models and FMR implications for hospitals during pandemics. Therefore, the authors offer several insights: increasing the supply risk creates temporary bottleneck strategies, letting purchasers adopt a short-term perspective and emphasizing the high mobility of commodities in the Kraljic commodity matrix. Additionally, despite more collaboration uncovered in other studies regarding COVID-19, strong rivalry arose at the beginning of the pandemic, leading to increased competition and less collaboration. Given such increased FMR, procurement managers and governments become important gatekeepers to balance resource allocation during pandemics both within and between hospitals.

中文翻译：

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大流行期间医院采购的 Kraljic 和竞争性竞争观点 (COVID-19)：荷兰案例研究

目的

采购专业人员广泛使用采购组合模型来根据不同产品组的需求定制采购策略。然而，这些方法在医院中的应用以及大流行冲击的影响仍然很大程度上未知。本文旨在评估 COVID-19 大流行期间医院采购人员的采购策略、要素市场竞争 (FMR) 对策略的影响以及在这种情况下采购组合分类的有效性。

设计/方法/方法

这项关于荷兰医院采购的定性研究得到了官方政府出版物的二手数据的支持。对大型医院的 13 名医院采购员进行了半结构化访谈。解释性方法用于分析访谈并呈现结果。

发现

研究结果表明，产品稀缺迫使购买者将它们视为医院层面的（临时）瓶颈项目。采用的策略在很大程度上与基于 Kraljic 的商品管理模型的预期行为一致。将 FMR 视角添加到模型有助于进一步将危机策略归类为有意义的类别。除了库存管理，增加供应、减少需求和加强资源协调是其他常见策略。一个重要的发现是，购买者和政府充当了引导 FMR 的看门人，从而减少了医院之间和医院内部潜在的有害竞争。

社会影响

COVID-19 大流行的毁灭性经历揭示了危机时期公共医疗保健提供的严重弱点。本研究评估了医院采购商为应对供应链短缺而采取的策略。本研究的结果强调了危机时期看门人的重要性，并提出了购买者可以采取的确保资源供应的策略。

原创性/价值

尚未就大流行期间医院的采购组合模型和 FMR 影响进行研究。因此，作者提供了几个见解：增加供应风险会产生暂时的瓶颈策略，让购买者采用短期视角，并强调 Kraljic 商品矩阵中商品的高流动性。此外，尽管在其他关于 COVID-19 的研究中发现了更多的合作，但在大流行开始时出现了激烈的竞争，导致竞争加剧和合作减少。鉴于 FMR 的增加，采购经理和政府成为重要的看门人，以在医院内部和医院之间的大流行期间平衡资源分配。