Since its establishment, the NBA has relied on a single server and dated PCs to manage its information, but there was always a plan to overhaul IT to prepare for a national data warehouse that could collate and report blood-related information at a national level.

The authority's deputy general manager, Stephanie Gunn, told Computerworld while there was initially a reliance on Health's systems, it quickly became a priority to develop its own to fulfill the need for information exchange.

"There was a need to improve the purchasing process for blood and blood products [and] we chose a simple stand-alone, very cheap system to start with," Gunn said. "We took a conscious decision to say the system will last three years to do what we need to do from a procurement perspective."

At the end of the three-year period the system started to struggle and was not coping with the volume of data the NBA now holds.

Due to the complexity of its supply planning, the NBA first put out a tender last year for the development of an integrated data management system (IDMS) which was awarded to Kobald and is in the final stages of production.