E-Sourcing Analysis and Optimisation
A multi-site Australian hospital group engaged Vokke to address a procurement problem rooted in data quality. Pricing decisions were being made on incomplete, inconsistent information spread across disconnected systems.
The group's procurement process relied on manual data entry, hard copy documentation and fragmented systems with no standard export interface. Product nomenclature was inconsistent - the same generic medicine appeared under multiple brand names - and supplier pricing proposals involved bundled offers and nonlinear pricing structures that could not be meaningfully compared by hand.
The objective was to build a system that could consolidate, clean and standardise this data, then use it to evaluate supplier proposals at a level of detail that manual processes could not reach.
Each hospital site maintained its own data systems. Formats varied, quality was uneven, and there was no reliable way to merge records into a single view.
This created two problems. First, the group could not produce a clean, consolidated dataset to inform procurement decisions. Second, when supplier proposals did arrive, they contained complex pricing structures - bundled offers, volume-based tiers, nonlinear discounts - that were difficult to evaluate in isolation and impractical to compare across suppliers manually.
Any solution needed to handle both: bringing the data together, and making the resulting analysis meaningful.
Vokke defined a canonical data format that could accommodate records from every hospital system in the group. Software was then built to convert each site's data into this common structure, correcting known inconsistencies and flagging entries that required manual review.
Hundreds of thousands of records were consolidated into a single, cleaned dataset. From this, a condensed medicine list was produced to serve as the basis for a formal request for proposal.
The approach treated data quality as the prerequisite, not a parallel workstream. Without a reliable dataset, no amount of analysis would produce trustworthy results.
Vokke built a secure online portal for supplier submissions, paired with a custom optimisation algorithm to evaluate pricing proposals.
Suppliers submitted individualised pricing proposals through the portal, structured against the standardised medicine list. This removed ambiguity from the submission process and ensured proposals could be compared on a consistent basis.
A nonlinear optimisation algorithm, running on cloud infrastructure, evaluated the full range of offer combinations - accounting for bundled pricing, volume thresholds and conditional discounts. The system identified purchasing strategies that would not have been visible through manual comparison.
The output was a clear, evidence-based recommendation the group could act on with confidence.
The group moved from fragmented, manually assembled data to a single consolidated dataset covering all sites. Supplier proposals were evaluated against consistent criteria, and purchasing decisions were supported by quantitative analysis rather than estimation.
The system reduced collection errors, removed subjectivity from proposal evaluation, and produced a purchasing strategy the group could justify and reproduce.
