GeM Procurement for Hospital Medicines and Consumables

Every GeM bid inherits the specification template of the category you pick, and the category also determines which registered sellers even see the bid in their dashboard. Publishing an infusion set requirement under a generic plastic disposables category will surface it to sellers who have never supplied a hospital and hide it from the ones who have. Spend time in the category tree before you spend time on quantities. If the exact category does not exist, that fact is itself a signal about route suitability.

For medicines, the specification has to be written in the language a manufacturer recognises: generic name and strength as it appears in the National List of Essential Medicines or the relevant pharmacopoeia, dosage form, pack configuration, the pharmacopoeial standard you will test against, and the licences you require the seller to hold under the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules. Brand names in a public specification invite a challenge unless you can justify them, and justifying them is a separate process.

There is a real trade-off in how tightly you specify. Every additional mandatory parameter narrows the seller pool, and a narrowed pool produces single-bid outcomes that either have to be retendered or approved as a single-tender exception. Loosen the specification and you widen participation but import quality variance. Decide deliberately which parameters are clinical requirements and which are inherited habit from an old tender document nobody has reread.

Low participation is usually rational behaviour on the seller's side rather than apathy. A manufacturer weighing your bid is looking at order value against compliance effort: earnest money deposit, performance security, document uploads, the additional terms and conditions you attached, the number of consignee locations, and the payment record of the buying institution. If the annual value is modest and the ATC runs to eleven clauses, the sales team spends its bidding capacity elsewhere.

The structural issue is that most medicine supply in India runs through distributors, while your bid may effectively require a manufacturer or an authorised entity holding a valid OEM authorisation. When your specification demands a WHO-GMP certificate and a manufacturing licence, the distributor who would have quoted cannot, and the manufacturer who can does not find the volume interesting. You have written a bid that nobody in the actual supply chain is positioned to answer.

The fixes are unglamorous. Aggregate quantity across a full year rather than issuing quarterly bids for the same item. Hold a pre-bid conference and publish the clarifications. Set a delivery period that a manufacturer can actually schedule a batch against. Reduce the consignee count where you can consolidate to a central store. And pay on time, because payment reputation travels through the distributor network faster than any tender notice.

Technical rejection is where bids die quietly. A seller uploads documents, the evaluating committee reviews against the stated criteria, and offers are knocked out for reasons that were foreseeable when the bid was drafted. Some of that is the seller's problem. A surprising share is the buyer's, because the criteria were ambiguous, contradicted the category template, or asked for a document that does not exist in the form named.

The most frequent avoidable cause is asking for a certificate under a name that no issuing authority uses, so every seller uploads something slightly different and the committee has no consistent basis to evaluate. The second is setting a past-performance or turnover threshold that excludes exactly the specialised suppliers your clinical specification requires. The third is failing to state how equivalence will be judged, which turns evaluation into an argument.

Build a rejection log and review it every quarter. For each rejected offer, record the clause invoked, whether the clause was clear, and whether the same clause has rejected offers repeatedly. Clauses that reject most bidders are usually badly written rather than usefully strict. This log is also the document that protects the committee if a rejection is challenged later, because it shows a consistent application rather than a case-by-case decision.

When the catalogue category cannot express what you need, a custom bid lets you write your own specification and attach your own evaluation criteria. It is the right instrument for a composite requirement — a dialysis consumable set, a theatre pack with defined components, a reagent package tied to an installed platform. The cost is that you now own the specification entirely, including any ambiguity a bidder later exploits.

A bill of quantities bid suits requirements where the line items are known but the quantities vary, such as an annual consumable basket across multiple departments. It compares bidders on a total rather than item by item, which is efficient but hides the fact that a bidder can load price onto the items you will actually consume and discount the ones you listed optimistically. Weight your BOQ quantities on last year's real consumption, not on departmental wish lists.

Where an item is genuinely available from one source, the proprietary article route exists, but it requires a certificate signed by a competent authority stating why no substitute is acceptable. Treat that signature seriously. A PAC issued because the surgeon prefers a brand will not survive an audit; a PAC issued because the consumable is mechanically keyed to an installed instrument will. Write the technical reasoning into the certificate rather than the preference.

Award is the halfway point. What determines whether the bid delivered value is fulfilment: did the full quantity arrive, in the specified pack, within the residual shelf life, at the right consignee, with batch documentation that your pharmacy can actually enter. Partial fulfilment against a competitively priced award is a worse outcome than a slightly higher rate that arrives complete, because your wards buy the shortfall at emergency local rates.

The acceptance step deserves a named owner and a deadline. Consignee receipt and acceptance has to be recorded against each delivery, and delays there stall seller payment, which feeds straight back into next year's participation. Set an internal rule that goods are inspected and accepted or rejected within a fixed number of working days of arrival, and report the ageing of pending acceptances to the materials committee monthly.

Reconcile awarded quantity against delivered quantity at contract close, not at year end. A stores system that holds the bid reference, the awarded rate, the batch, and the goods receipt on one record makes this a report rather than an investigation. HealUDoc inventory records can carry the purchase reference alongside batch and expiry so the fulfilment picture is assembled from transactions rather than from a parallel spreadsheet.

There are legitimate cases where the platform should not be used, and the discipline is to document them rather than quietly bypass them. Emergency and life-saving requirements where the delivery period cannot wait for a bid cycle. Items where the category does not exist and a custom bid would require a specification your team cannot defend. Narcotic and psychotropic items governed by their own custody and licensing chain. Reagents where the installed analyser makes substitution clinically meaningless.

In each of those cases, the file should carry the availability position on the platform, the reason it does not meet the requirement, the alternative route chosen, and the approval of the authority competent to sanction it. That file is what an audit looks at. A bypass with reasoning recorded contemporaneously is defensible; the same bypass reconstructed a year later from memory is not.

The mature position is that the platform is one route among several, suited to a defined slice of your item master and unsuited to the rest. Hospitals that force everything through it end up with failed bids, emergency purchases at poor rates, and a stores team that has lost the habit of writing good specifications. Hospitals that never use it lose the price discovery it provides on exactly the commoditised items where price discovery matters most.