Every hospital supply chain project — a new ERP, a spend analytics tool, a GPO contract, a consignment programme — starts with the same discovery: the item master has thousands of duplicates and the vendor master has the same supplier spelled five ways. Until that is fixed, every report is wrong and every automation misfires. The good news is that 30 focused days fix the 80% that matters.
Week 1 — Measure and freeze
Count active items and vendors, and how many had a transaction in the last 12 months. Typically a third of items and half of vendors are dormant. Freeze new master records without a gatekeeper (one person, one form, one day turnaround). Agree the golden-record fields: for items — generic name, strength, form, pack size, unit of measure, UNSPSC or internal category, GS1 GTIN where it exists, registration number; for vendors — legal name, trade licence, tax number, bank details, categories supplied, contact.
Week 2 — Vendors
Deduplicate by tax number and trade licence first (exact matches), then by normalised name (strip LLC, FZE, punctuation; fuzzy match). Merge, keep one ID, map the others. Deactivate vendors with no transactions in 24 months. Expect to cut the active vendor list by 30–50%.
Week 3 — Items, top down
Sort items by 12-month spend. The top 2,000 usually carry 80% of value. Clean those by hand: one description standard (generic name + strength + form + pack), category assigned, GTIN captured from the pack or the supplier catalogue, duplicates merged. Leave the long tail for rule-based cleansing later.
Week 4 — Governance and the quick win
Publish the data standard, the request form and the SLA. Train the two or three people who create records. Then take the clean top-2,000 list, run the price-variance report across sites, and hand procurement its first list of harmonisation savings — this is how the cleansing project pays for itself inside the month.
Tools
Excel and a disciplined person get you through the 30 days. Beyond that, master-data tools and enrichment services (GS1 data pools, supplier catalogue feeds) keep it clean. The order matters: clean first, then tool. Groups that buy the tool first spend a year configuring it around dirty data.