Choosing

Choosing the Right Level Of Procurement Support For Your Veterinary Practice

Running a veterinary practice, whether that’s a single clinic or a small group, is a constant balancing act. You’re focused on delivering excellent patient care, supporting your team, and managing day-to-day operations. Procurement often sits in the background, handled as and when needed, sometimes on a reactive basis.

However, with rising costs across all walks of life, including medicines, consumables, and equipment, procurement is becoming an increasingly important lever for maintaining healthy margins for a veterinary clinic.  

The good news is that there is help out there; Veterinary Procurement Partners is on hand to support you as much or as little as you need, through three service offerings: Procurement Health Check, Strategic Procurement Review or Embedded Procurement Partner.

I thought it would be useful to talk through how they differ, and what they might look like in a real practice setting and identify when each of the offerings might be most appropriate.

1. Health Check: A Simple Way To Sense-Check Your Costs

A Procurement Health Check is a straightforward, low-commitment way to understand how your current purchasing measures up.

What it includes:

• Practice visit to collect data

• High-level spend analysis of the key contributing categories for your direct (clinical) costs; so that’s pharma, consumables, lab, small equipment and cremations.

• Benchmarking against industry standards

• Identification of quick cost-saving opportunities

• Set of recommendations and action plan to be executed by the clinic

Benefits:

• A relatively quick process to identify actionable improvements

• Highlights inefficiencies you may not see day-to-day

• Identifies “quick wins”

• Gives you a clearer baseline for decision-making

Best suited for:

• Single-site practices or small groups

• Owners who haven’t reviewed procurement recently

• Clinics looking for practical cost reduction

Think of a health check like a routine clinical exam; it won’t solve everything, but it quickly highlights what might need attention and if further diagnostics are required.

2. Strategic Review: Delving A Little Deeper

A Strategic Review takes things a step further. It’s about putting some structure around how purchasing decisions are made, without turning your practice into a corporate machine.

What it includes:

• Practice visits to collect data, speaking to the team and observing how the practice functions

• Detailed analysis across key spending areas, including both clinical and non-clinical costs

• Clear, practical procurement strategy and action plan aligned to your practice, with or without support for execution

• Benefits tracking

Benefits:

• A deeper dive in spend across clinical and non-clinical areas

• A roadmap for sustainable savings, not just one-off wins

• Better visibility across sites (if you have more than one)

• Stronger supplier relationships and pricing leverage

Best suited for:

• Growing independent groups where consistency of approach is important to ensure alignment of purchasing behaviour

• Practices noticing margin pressure; it’d be wise to start here to get a fuller assessment

• As the next step following a health check and quick win execution

If the health check is the clinical exam, the strategic review is the diagnostic plan followed by commencement of treatment.

3. Embedded Partner: Enabling You To Focus On Pet Care

For some independent practices, the biggest challenge isn’t knowing what to do, it’s finding the time to do it.

Embedded procurement support brings in experienced resource to work alongside your team, helping turn plans into action.

What it includes:

• A procurement specialist working remotely and/or alongside your team at an agreed frequency

• Detailed strategic action plan creation for clinical and non clinical costs

• Hands-on supplier negotiation and management

• Implementation of agreed changes

• Ongoing tracking of savings and supplier performance

Benefits:

• Access to expertise without hiring internally and the associated costs

• Takes pressure off practice owners and managers to enable them to concentrate on clinical care

• Helps ensure improvements get delivered

• Maintains momentum over time

Best suited for:

• Larger independent groups

• Time-stretched owners or practice managers

• Practices that have identified opportunities but lack capacity to act

This is about giving the clinic time back. Continuing the analogy, it’s like getting a peripatetic specialist in to manage the clinical case.

Final Thoughts

Procurement doesn’t need to be complicated to have an impact.

For independent veterinary practices, even small, practical changes: better pricing, fewer suppliers, and clearer processes can make a noticeable difference over time.

Approached in the right way, procurement support isn’t about dictating changes for solely commercial benefit. It’s working with the team to identify agreeable changes that maintain or elevate clinical standards whilst at the same time helping control costs. It’s about giving you more control, more clarity, and ultimately more time to focus on running your practice.

If any of this resonates with you, please get in touch, I am more than happy to discuss your specific requirements.