Supporting an extended period of rapid growth put tremendous pressure on Northside’s supply chain to meet increasing demand for a wider array of products at optimal pricing. Initially, there was poor visibility into overall spend and little consistency in procurement processes across the system. The item master contained hundreds of duplicates created by both stock and non-stock items, 4,000 invalid products with 50% of items not ordered over the previous 18 months. This made it difficult for requestors to identify the exact item they needed from the thousands available and hindered efforts to standardize supplies. More than half of its items were non-file—purchased outside of Northside’s item master and therefore outside the control of the supply chain team. In addition, requisitioning was primarily a manual, paper-based process.

The results of a product benchmark study indicated that there was over $15M in annual price reduction opportunities for med-surg supplies. With less than two percent of con-tract association to spend, Northside was missing significant opportunities to optimize contract pricing. To identify and capitalize on potential savings opportunities, it became clear that Northside would have to fundamentally redesign the sourcing, contract management and purchasing processes. The newly designed processes would have to be enabled by a dynamic, cloud-based digital platform that could integrate with Northside’s ERP system and would be capable of providing real-time information for informed decision making. After defining business requirements, Northside performed due diligence on third-party applications that could optimize the procurement processes. Meperia was selected as the clear best fit for Northside.