Helio Clinical brought 190 suppliers into one auditable record

The situation

Helio worked across three countries with suppliers ranging from laboratory equipment vendors to individual clinical consultants. Supplier records lived in a spreadsheet, insurance certificates in a shared drive, and approvals in the inbox of whoever happened to give them.

With an audit approaching, the operations team could not reliably answer who had approved what, or confirm that every active supplier held current insurance.

What changed

• One supplier record per entity, with contacts, terms, banking verification evidence, and documents in one place.
• Expiry dates tracked on every compliance document, with reminders to the named supplier owner.
• Approval rules encoded by amount and category, with parallel routing so cross-border purchases stopped stalling.
• A standing delegate for every approver, which removed the holiday backlog entirely.

The result

Onboarding a low-risk supplier now takes two days rather than two weeks. Every purchase carries a retrievable approval trail. The audit request that prompted the project was answered from a single export.

The unplanned benefit was commercial: consolidating duplicate supplier records surfaced $210,000 of annual spend split across entities that turned out to be the same parent company.

The honest caveats

Two-day onboarding applies to low-risk suppliers. Anything touching patient data still runs a security review that takes one to three weeks, and Helio did not want that compressed. The 100% evidence figure covers purchases raised in the system from go-live forward; historical approvals sitting in old inboxes were never migrated, and reconstructing them was judged not worth the cost.