Business owners across the United States overwhelmingly report concerns about supply chain disruptions in 2025, specifically related to tariffs. Market shifts and challenges have led many supply chain leaders to take a critical eye to existing processes, where they often discover a lack of foundational visibility that could give them an edge in the coming years.
This type of supply chain assessment has been underway for several years in the healthcare industry. The pandemic revealed just how quickly outdated workflows and just-in-time ordering can falter under stress. And in healthcare, the implications are significant. If organizations don’t understand current and upcoming inventory, they may not have critical supplies to support uninterrupted patient care.
The enormous pressure on healthcare’s supply chain has led to a wave of advancements and innovation that supply chain leaders of all industries can learn from. By exploring common gaps in processes and workflows, supply chain leaders can lay the groundwork for stronger visibility to gain critical efficiencies.
Common gaps in procurement and payment processes
Supply chain executives everywhere struggle with common workflow pitfalls that result in critical data gaps. Unfortunately, many of these leaders have written these gaps off as “normal.” Inventory and procurement workers feel the pain of clunky, fragmented processes, but find workarounds. Executives see the effect on their bottom line, but aren’t sure where these gaps exist, because they don’t have a full picture of their supply chain. There are a few core issues likely causing these disconnects.
To start, surveys show that 67.4% of supply chain managers still rely on spreadsheets as part of their supply chain management approach. Even in organizations that have invested in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, visibility challenges persist. ERPs are often designed for enterprise-scale finance and resource planning, but in healthcare they may not capture the unique needs of decentralized facilities or multi-vendor purchasing. As a result, teams frequently supplement them with manual processes, which can reintroduce the very gaps those systems were meant to solve. This includes tracking orders and inventory across multiple suppliers and locations. Not only does a spreadsheet lack the sophistication and automation needed to truly understand up-to-date information about what’s on your shelves or loading onto the truck, but it also forces staff to chase individual vendors and products through multiple sites, platforms and processes.
Manually updated systems like this are clunky and can cause errors. More importantly, they can make it challenging to hunt down the information needed to perform a reliable three-way match. Since most organizations use a supply chain model where inventory orders are handled separately from payments, different information from various spreadsheets must be shared across multiple departments, compounding the risk for errors in the process.
With all that information stored and shared across so many touchpoints, it’s no wonder that 57% of supply chain professionals noted that visibility was their biggest challenge. Traditional siloed processes, therefore siloed data, doesn’t make strong visibility easy. Whether relying primarily on spreadsheets or leaning on ERP systems, many organizations still face a similar outcome: fragmented data and manual workarounds that limit supply chain visibility.
Closing gaps to gain valuable visibility
Post-pandemic, as healthcare’s supply chain executives collectively turned their focus to creating stronger, more transparent supply chains, three core strategies bubbled to the surface to eliminate these all-too-common challenges.
1. Re-evaluate current processes, tools and contracts. For leading healthcare organizations still working primarily in Excel, upgrading from a spreadsheet to a more modern, dedicated inventory and payment solution was a foundational fix. If teams are constantly hot-wiring workarounds or taking on manual tasks from a spreadsheet or software solution, there’s likely a solution out there that has solved for that.
When it comes to vendors, consider metrics like cost and performance, but also look at how you communicate with suppliers. Are you working on ten different platforms, ordering and outreaching to ten different vendors individually? Care teams and administrators benefit when vendor processes are unified and the same holds true for supply chain staff across industries. The more fragmented the workflow, the harder it is to achieve reliable visibility. A unified vendor management platform goes a long way in speeding processes and reducing workload for already strained teams.
2. Automate smartly. Fifty-six percent of supply chain businesses reported “high” AI readiness, with 90% within that group actively creating or investing in new jobs to support AI adoption. This mirrors what we see in healthcare, where organizations are taking a pragmatic approach. They start with AI for simple, repeatable tasks such as demand forecasting and invoice matching, before layering in more complex use cases.
Healthcare has prioritized tools that integrate AI by targeting low-hanging fruit that can take work off people’s plates. In the supply chain, that includes learning from trends in your data, forecasting to make orders more proactive, and automating workflows to reduce manual tasks for staff.
3. Combine as many steps as possible into one, right-sized platform. It used to make sense to go to multiple stores to shop for food, like the bakery, then the butcher, then the market. Today, most people choose the efficiency of one grocery store. Supply chains face a similar choice.
In healthcare, leaders have recognized that ERP systems play an important role in managing enterprise finance and operations. At the same time, day-to-day procurement and vendor management often take place outside those systems, creating parallel processes that make visibility harder to achieve. Progress has come from simplifying and streamlining—bringing procurement, inventory, and payment workflows closer together. These unified platforms do a better job of closing the gaps between historically separate tasks, like procurement and payment, to improve 3-way match and ultimately boost margins.
Supply chain visibility is a major concern across all industries, but the good news is that many of these challenges have already been addressed in healthcare. By looking at how healthcare has adapted and borrowing proven approaches, supply chain leaders in every sector can close visibility gaps, reduce waste and create clearer, more efficient operations that save time and improve margins.
