1) The global pharmaceutical industries had experienced average sales growth, and lower growth was predicted for the next few years. Pricing pressures from managed care and government programs, and the loss of leading drugs' patent protection would also give an impact to pharmaceutical sales. To deal with these issues, a lot of pharmaceutical companies decided to implement a better way for procurement management, so did Betapharm - one of the largest pharmaceutical companies. Currently, Betapharm had applied the Emptoris ePass system, and expected the improvement on both global hotel contracts and malic acid products, which were two primary costing of Betapharm.
2) Betapharm Corp. had to learn the advantages and disadvantages of accepting ePass system, and to decide its appropriate sourcing method for global hotels and malic acid products.
3) George Brannigan: vice president of procurement, needed to analyze the effect of ePass system, and to be clear and definite on the suppliers and situation of global hotels and malic acid products. Also, his suggestion about sourcing method would be important.
Doug Burke: director of eSourcing.
Robert Houlihan: led the sourcing group of global hotel contracts.
Michael Wilkenson: led the sourcing group of malic acid.
Tao: one of the leading suppliers to the pharmaceutical industry, and a current supplier of Betapharm, helped with developing malin into malic acid.
4) -Betapharm can use ePass for both global hotels and malic acid, and the procurement process could be concentrated, which would be easier to manage, but the flexibility of selecting suppliers might be affected, also the relationship with current suppliers, such as Tao, might be broken.
-Focusing on larger and beneficial markets, North America was the largest pharmaceutical market, and the following were Europe and Japan. According to Betapharm's historical statistics, 80% of hotel nights were spent in U.