Cumbria e-Procurement

Transforming procurement to drive efficiencies across Cumbria 

The Challenge
The Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) in 2007 set efficiency targets for Cumbria Council of £30m over the three years to 2010. As part of our seven-year ICT strategic partnership with the Council, Agilisys has been working with Cumbria since 2005 to look at ways in which business transformation and innovative IT solutions can help the Council to achieve their targets whilst maintaining and improving customer service levels.

The procurement function was one area we jointly determined could benefit from improvement. The function was highly fragmented and decentralised, the administration was mainly paper based and it lacked a robust framework. In addition, the lack of data on the Council’s addressable spend and an inability to adhere to the Government’s 10-day target for paying suppliers led them to engage with Agilisys to help tackle these issues.

The Solution
Agilisys developed a compelling business case to establish a shared service platform for procurement across the Council to address some of the challenges they were facing, and went on to transform the procurement function through business process re-engineering. The team implemented an integrated procurement solution to provide robust financial controls, restructured the procurement unit to meet the savings challenge, and critically developed an approach to identify and capture savings opportunities.

Working closely with the Council’s Corporate Director of Resources the Agilisys project team was responsible for:
Establishing a Strategic Corporate Procurement Unit (SCPU) as a vehicle for change across the council
Transitioning the procurement function from a de-centralised to a fully centralised operational model
Delivering a pilot that identified £1.1m of annual savings using the Agilisys savings methodology and the opportunity to apply in additional areas
Identifying the council’s addressable spend

The project covered a number of key areas including:
Business process re-engineering of the entire procurement function underpinned by a category management approach to savings
Managing council supplier adoption
Selecting the most appropriate technical solution to support the programme
Change management by working with individuals across the council to change ways of working
Future collaborative working
Strict project governance and resources management

The Benefits
In the space of just three months the project exceeded client expectations with improved service levels and significant savings achieved for the council, including:
Identification of the Council’s addressable spend of over £150m
Year 1 savings of £1.1m = 1%
Year 2 savings increasing to 1.5% of addressable spend (and 2% in year 2 onwards)
Supplier payments down to 8 days from 28 days, now well within the government’s 10-day target
Savings of £40k achieved in one category alone in the first two months, which equals close to £0.5m of savings in the next 12 months