Page 26 - HME Business, April 2019

You work hard all day. You have to stay on top of patient service, your staff, regula- tions, billing, inventory, delivery, quality control. It can all seem like a game of whack-a-mole just to stay in business. And then there’s competition from local and online retailers. If you can, you take an annual vacation to a Zen spa or retreat where gurus tell you to relax and give up control. You laugh, sip margaritas and go back to the same overload in two weeks’ time.
What the guru didn’t tell you is that working with a distributor is how you incorporate that Zen advice into your business: you have to give up control to get control.
It may be reflex to think of a distributor as just a supplier or drop-shipper, but distributors can do many things that you’ve been used to doing and managing yourself. So relax, breathe deeply
BY HOLLY WAGNER
and look at some of the ways distributors can bring order and prosperity to your business.
Much of what distributors do can save retailers time and money. They offer the purchasing power of huge volume that brings prices down for their customers. Working with a distributor can also help stabilize costs and free up working capital and staff time. The retailer doesn’t have to spend time negotiating pricing with the manufacturer, meet purchasing goals or buy
in bulk quantities and still gets generally lower pricing than an individual account could provide. It might also extend the retailer’s geographic reach and give access to manufacturers that might not work with small accounts.
“We take the burden off of them. We nego- tiate with vendors on their behalf. We also buy
it as well as you can buy it,” says Colton Mason, senior vice president of Supreme Medical. “Our biggest DME line is Drive Medical, the top brand in that industry for bent metals. Supreme buys
that by the tractor-trailer load several times a week. We negotiate our contract and extend costs out to DMEs based on our buying power.”
Supreme also handles returns and repair issues for its clients, Mason says. “All of your returns, warranty and repairs flows through your Supreme Medical rep. They take care of all that paperwork for you.”
In years past, providers hesitated to work with distributors for fear of losing control of service and patient lists. “There was no emphasis put on how a distributor could make a provider more efficient,” says Jeff Bowman, vice president of HME sales for McKesson. “The relationship has changed dramatically. Providers are looking at a distributor for more than a supplier and a price.”
LOSING CONTROL, OR LOSING MASSIVE OVERHEAD?
The easiest thing to let go of when you start working with a distributor is inventory.
12 HMEBusiness | April 2019 | hme-business.com
Management Solutions | Technology | Products
AND THE ART OF WORKING WITH DISTRIBUTORS