Procurement Demand Aggregation

A demand aggregation contract was established to combine purchases of common goods and services to yield better value for money through economies of scale. In an organization where common goods and services are not consolidated, the procurers are unaware of what the others are purchasing. There is a need for the central procurement department to sieve out the purchases to identify suitable items for demand aggregation, but can often be a manual and onerous process. To address this problem, a set of methods to analyze the textual description of the purchase order was developed to accelerate the process, producing a list of specific recommended goods commonly bought that would result in potential cost savings through demand aggregation.