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Police Authority achieves purchasing compliance and essential financial controls

Vue d'ensemble

Profile

Operates in
United Kingdom

No. of departments
35

No. of employees
10,000+

Annual spend
£100 million p.a.

No. of orders
80,000 p.a.

Vertical Sector
Public sector

Objectives

  • Automate and transform the Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) process.
  • Achieve real-time visibility, effective approvals and full audit trail of all spend.
  • Reduce the time and cost involved in ordering goods and services.

How Proactis helped

  • Enabled an inductive buying experience for 10,000 every-day users across 35 departments.
  • Created customised order templates and approval workflows.
  • Centralised invoice management.
  • Delivered a complete end-to-end Purchase-to-Pay platform with integration to Infor SunSystems.

Benefits to the Authority

  • Eliminated maverick spending with 100% visibility and control of corporate expenditure.
  • Significantly reduced the time and resource involved in the P2P process.
  • Supported organisational and process change with highly configurable, off-the-shelf software.
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Profile

The Police Authority is one of the largest in England and Wales, employing approximately 10,000 staff. It is split into eight divisions and 35 internal departments, with each division and department managing its own budget.

The Authority spends around £100m per annum on a diverse range of indirect goods and services – from interpreters, to stationery, to uniforms, and multi-million pound contracts – with no computerised process for requisitioning, resulting in inefficiency and little auditability.

Objectives

The Authority needed to establish an end-to-end vision for organisational spend management: To streamline the purchase and invoice handling process, imposing vital controls over spending, delivering cost-base visibility and automating inefficient processes to bring savings from process efficiencies and economies of scale.

This included a complete Purchase-to-Pay process from requisition through invoice matching, discrepancy resolution and integration with their Infor SunSystems finance system. Other requirements included: in-house categorised list of goods/services, document imaging to streamline data flow and tracking, entry and processing of “after-the-event” expense purchases, and corporate stores for uniforms.

How Proactis helped

After a trial roll-out in one of their divisions, Proactis Purchase-to-Pay was extended across the Authority, with 80% of staff using the system within 12 months.

The highly configurable solution now allows all 10,000 staff to only see what they need when raising a requisition to make the process quicker and simpler. In-house supplier catalogues and ‘punch out’ to supplier websites provide easy access to content. Corporate stores for items such as uniforms are all maintained in a multi-location virtual warehouse.

Workflow takes the purchasing transaction through the appropriate authorisation routes according to organisational rules. Once goods and services are delivered they are receipted in Proactis to enable automated invoice matching. Combined with electronic processing of employee expenses, this significantly reduces administrative effort in Accounts Payable.

Benefits to the Authority

With Proactis the Authority has established a corporate control framework including procurement guidelines and processes. The results are 100% visibility of corporate expenditure, improved economies of scale and on-contract buying to mitigate risk and fraud.

This delivers an organisation-wide impact – improving return from budget with all its implications, introducing efficiencies and enabling greater visibility of liabilities.

The Procurement department is also benefiting from the ability to analyse spend across different categories and suppliers so they can consolidate spend with fewer suppliers and negotiate better process for contracted items.