Benefits

• Manual work eliminated by on-line delivery of information
• No more mailing and packaging costs
• Less human error through automation

Challenge

A group purchasing organization, which negotiated and managed purchasing agreements on behalf of other organizations, needed to provide member organizations with access to purchasing contracts and a product catalog. This information had to be timely and accurate in order for the purchasing agents to complete their work successfully.

The delivery of information had historically been paper- based. Weekly mailings went out to update agreement files and price lists. The effort was manually intensive, expensive and error-prone.

Stratagem's Solution

Stratagem managed and staffed the creation of an “electronic file cabinet” for purchasing agreements and an on-line catalog for items covered in those agreements.

The Stratagem team began the requirements-definition effort with focus meetings involving key members of the client’s staff as well as the client’s member organizations. We also visited a cross-section of procurement organizations to get a feel for how things really worked in the field.

Result

The solution leveraged Microsoft’s Internet technology, providing a secured e-Business website that offered on-line, real-time access to a catalog of purchasing agreements and product prices.

The application was “profile-based” in that each member could see a customized view of the information. Access to agreements and product pricing was defined in profiles so the group purchasing organization could present different agreements based on member affiliation.

The current database holds approximately 500 purchasing agreements and 300,000 products, with multi-tiered prices for each product.