Procurement & Frameworks
Most supplier comparisons come down to price per unit. The things that actually cost you money are lead times, substitutions and what happens when an order goes wrong.
OMS Clinical Team
Product Specialists
Comparing suppliers on unit price is easy and mostly unhelpful. The price is visible before you commit; everything that goes wrong afterwards is not. These are the questions that separate a supplier who will be fine from one who will cost you a morning every month.
This is the single most useful question and the one least often asked. A stockholding supplier picks from their own shelves. A dropship supplier passes your order to a manufacturer or distributor who ships it directly. Both are legitimate. They fail differently.
Ask directly. A supplier who will not answer plainly is telling you something. If they dropship, ask how many suppliers sit behind the catalogue: one is simple and predictable, a dozen means your order may arrive in a dozen parcels on a dozen days.
Every supplier advertises a cut-off time. What matters is what happens after it. Ask whether the cut-off applies to the whole catalogue or only to stocked lines, and what the realistic lead time is on the items you actually buy rather than the headline.
It is worth asking for lead times on your three highest-volume lines specifically. A supplier confident in their supply chain will give you numbers. One who answers in generalities is managing your expectations early.
Ask what happens when the exact item is unavailable. There are three answers and only one of them is safe: they contact you, they send nothing, or they substitute something similar without telling you.
Silent substitution is a genuine clinical risk. A different glove material, a different mask standard or a different bin lid colour are not interchangeable, whatever the picking system thinks. Get the answer in writing before you open the account.
For medical devices, ask whether products are CE or UKCA marked as applicable and whether declarations of conformity are available on request. For anything you will be audited on, ask whether dispatch notes carry batch or lot numbers and expiry dates.
A supplier who can produce this quickly has systems. One who has to go and ask the manufacturer every time will be slow at exactly the moment you need it fast.
Net-30 terms are useful, but they are a credit facility and they come with an application. Ask what the terms actually are, what the credit limit will be, and what happens if you exceed it mid-month. A limit that stops your ordering in the last week of a busy month is worse than paying by card.
Ask whether pricing changes with volume, and whether that is banded per order or measured across a period. Banded per order encourages over-ordering, which is how stock ends up expiring in a cupboard.
Returns policy matters less than the process behind it. Ask who you call, whether that person can make a decision, and how long a credit takes to appear. A named account manager is worth more than a marginally better unit price when a delivery is wrong on a Friday afternoon.
Ask whether they will supply a sample before you commit to a case quantity. Ask what their most common complaint is, because a supplier willing to answer that honestly is usually one worth dealing with. Ask how long they have held the account of their longest-standing customer.
Ask what they are not good at. Every supplier has a weakness, and one who claims otherwise is either new or not being straight with you.
Take your three highest-volume lines and one awkward low-volume item. Ask each supplier for price, lead time and pack size on all four. The awkward item is the revealing one: it shows whether the range is genuinely deep or whether the catalogue is padded with things they cannot actually get quickly.
Then place one small real order before committing to anything. A trial order tells you more about picking accuracy, packaging and communication than any amount of comparison on paper.
