Increasing Digital Buyers and Boosting Growth through a Creative Product Strategy

The Challenge: Unclear Path to Capture Digital Growth Opportunities

The healthcare supply chain is highly efficient, but fragile. If any step in the buying process delays or fails, medical providers and patients can suffer a direct impact. Time is of the essence, but before a shipment happens, buyers must:

• Locate a supplier of scarce inventory 
• Communicate with multiple groups to identify substitution products across catalogs 
• Verify seller credentials and the product’s chain of custody
• Work out payment terms
• Expedite shipping, sometimes at premium rates 

HPX aims to improve and streamline this process, so buyers have shorter processing times and lower supply risks. With deep supplier relationships, HPX offers a digital exchange of unified, credentialed supply sources for buyers. When HPX reached out to UDig, the exchange wasn’t seeing the traction with buyers that they felt it could achieve. They required strategic perspectives on how to improve.

The Strategy: Product Discovery Process to Uncover Hidden Opportunities

Before we could design a strategy, we had to deeply analyze and understand what was holding the exchange back from achieving the desired goals. Through a comprehensive and consultative Discovery process, we uncovered the difficulties HPX was experiencing and the opportunities ahead of them.

Research & Analysis

Working alongside HPX in a series of collaborative workshops, UDig evaluated key factors about the exchange product as part of our Discovery process: 

• What market opportunities HPX addresses with their digital offerings 
• How easy the product was to use for current customers 
• How much technical effort each opportunity required 
• How both customers and HPX win as part of a value exchange 
• Where HPX’s digital offerings might be misaligned to their strategy 

Excerpt from UDig’s analysis documentation illustrating the story arc for HPX buyers.

From this complete viewpoint, we could assess their goals and opportunities from all angles allowing us to understand the possibilities. Additionally, we analyzed the service gaps that existed in the healthcare supply market and identified opportunities where HPX could enhance business offerings to fill these deficiencies. 

Brand & Features Assessment

To support our Discovery process, we had to understand HPX’s brand promises and ensure their product offering aligned with those expectations. Through close collaboration with HPX, we identified their value proposition and evaluated whether their product’s customer journey was communicating effectively.

Stakeholder Collaboration

We also worked directly with stakeholders to ensure their insights and input informed our research and our suggested solutions. We hosted product workshops with HPX executives to gather essential perspectives on their buying processes, growth goals, and marketplace value.

Steadfast Team Support

From start to finish, our client had the same dedicated team working with them as we analyzed needs, found opportunities, and designed strategies. This integrated support means that the client gained:

• The same dedicated professionals who were familiar with every stage of the project 
• Streamlined processes that eliminated segmented support and bottlenecks that hold up projects 
• Project evaluation through three lenses: product, design, and engineering 
• A diverse group of professionals working together to maximize our discovery, analysis, creativity, and concepts

With this service model, we enabled momentum to continue the project with a team at each stage of our capabilities: 

1. Discover (Product)
2. Build (Software)
3. Measure (Data)
4. Automate (Intelligent Automation)

The Outcome: Focused Framework for Growth

Through our Discovery process, we identified that HPX’s needs were greater than simply redesigning a part of their product. Ultimately, they had to improve how they articulated their value to buyers digitally. 

Excerpt from UDig’s analysis documentation illustrating the digital story arc.

Excerpt from UDig’s analysis documentation illustrating the parts of the story arc that drive interest from buyers.

Today, HPX not only has a blueprint to improve their customer experience but a new framework for increasing digital buyers and boosting growth. By doing so, they’ll be able to focus their digital efforts on:

• Anticipating inventory that’s in short supply 
• Highlighting credentialed sellers to fill supply gaps before they’re an issue 
• Providing tailored experiences to their niche online customer: healthcare buyers
• Alleviating time pressure to facilitate cost-effective shipping
• Minimizing customers’ patient impacts by enabling timely, emergency purchases

From here, HPX has the strategies they need to enhance buyer relationships with minimal technology investments, which is critical to their bottom line. With UDig’s creative product strategy, they can measure their performance against key business metrics — and ensure business growth that drives them and the industry forward.