Towards a Maturity Model for Supplier Relationship Management of Hospitals

Structural changes and increasing market dynamics in the healthcare sector intensify the hospitals’ need for cost-savings and process optimisation. One source to generate not only short-term savings, but also sustainable benefits is the active and sophisticated management of relationships with suppliers, commonly referred to as supplier relationship management (SRM). As material cost continuously increase in the healthcare sector, it is crucial to understand the basic concepts of SRM in general, but also to recognise the potentials for health service providers in particular. For this reason, it is the aim of the proposed thesis to investigate how hospitals can establish an effective and efficient SRM under consideration of domain-specific effects on networkability. Result of the research process is a maturity model which allows the measurement of the actual state of SRM adoption of a hospital and the systematic identification of areas where improvements can be made.