NSW Dept. of Health deploys Sterling e-Procurement solution

Sterling Commerce will supply a standards-based e-procurement hub solution to the New South Wales Department of Health (NSW Health).

Gentran Integration Suite (GIS), an integration platform for business-to-business (B2B) collaboration based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) from Sterling Commerce, will standardise and simplify the department’s purchasing processes.

According to Michael Vulcan, managing director, Sterling Commerce A/NZ, with the considerable cost pressure to meet current and future demands for services, GIS has all the features required to build a sustainable information infrastructure that can move and manage critical information quickly, securely and at low cost.

It will replace a previous manual system, which was prone to human error, and provide the organisation with a single “source of truth” for all 30,000 internal items and potentially millions of vendor items purchased annually across the state.

“We selected Sterling Commerce because it has the unique expertise, proven track record and ability to deliver success within the budget and timeframe required,” said Valentino Bulaon, manager, Procurement Information – Health Support Services, NSW Health.

“GIS will enable us to solve complexity in the procurement process and provide us with a robust platform to manage processes surrounding data management, thereby increasing productivity, and improving data quality.”

GIS will enable NSW Health to extend secure, managed process visibility to suppliers and other government departments.

GIS will let the department maintain internal data for each product, while enabling receipt and management of vendor data via an on-line interface to the National Product Catalogue (NPC), an online data pool managed by GS1 Australia and administered to NSW Health by the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA).

The NPC allows institutions in all States and Territories to obtain essential information about the medicines, medical devices and healthcare products they use, from one electronic source.

It also holds information about non-medical products, such as office supplies and food items.

Vendors not using the NPC will be able to add their term data directly into a web entry page. This form will enable one by one entry of term and pricing data or new items, changes to existing items and deletion of items.

All new vendor data will be maintained in the vendor catalogue and updated automatically when additions or changes are submitted.

NSW Health users will be able to directly log-in to the catalogue, receive and manage contract data from NSW Commerce, and publish files to other systems, including the NSW Health Oracle ERP system and the Department of Commerce Smartbuy application.

Sterling Commerce won the tender as part of a consortium in conjunction with Fusion Management and e-Centric Innovations.

The system is due to go live in March 2009.