System and method of dynamically generating and using peer groups in an electronic procurement system

An electronic procurement system for improving performance of a computer procurement application comprising:

• one or more processors;
• a non-transitory machine-readable medium having instructions embodied thereon, the instructions, when execute, perform operations comprising:
• creating and storing an entity database having rows corresponding to entities, each row having a plurality of attributes per entity;
• creating and storing an ordered table of matching rules, each matching rule having a priority value and two or more matching attributes;
• receiving a user input specifying a particular entity and a request to generate a current peer group of other entities;
• accessing the entity database to retrieve particular attributes of the particular entity based on the ordered table of the matching rules;
• reading the next successive matching rule in the ordered table of the matching rules;
• based on the particular attributes of the particular entity, and the matching rules, querying the entity database to receive a result set of matching entities as the current peer group of other entities for the particular entity, wherein the matching entities in the result set have attribute values of the attributes specified in the matching rules that exactly match the corresponding particular attributes of the particular entity;
• appending data for the matching entities in the result set to a peer group data structure associated with the particular entity;
• determining whether a peer group size of the peer group data structure associated with the particular entity is larger than a threshold size;
• and
• in response to determining that the peer group size of the peer group data structure is larger than the threshold size associated with the particular entity, programmatically transmitting the peer group data structure to an application for use in corresponding analytics or reporting.