Caerphilly County Borough Council achieves end-to-end procurement with Proactis

Executive overview

Profile

Vertical sector
Public Sector

No. of users
800+

Third party expenditure
£196m+ per annum

No. of residents
171,000+

Operates in
United Kingdom

Customer since
2003

Objectives

  • Establish end-to-end procurement to improve processes and workflow.
  • Gain greater visibility of spending, with the ability to track orders.
  • Achieve best value from sourcing.

How Proactis helped

  • Improved visibility of spend, compliance and transparency for the Procurement team.
  • Introduced a collaborative procurement portal powered by the Proactis sourcing solution.
  • Centralized contracts and enhanced visibility of contract opportunities for suppliers.

Benefits to the Council

  • Standardized purchasing across the Council and introduced best practice.
  • Full visibility of orders and spend to manage procurement and categories.'
  • Cost savings and process efficiencies for the Council and its suppliers.
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Profile

Caerphilly County Borough Council (CBC) is one of the largest Local Authorities in Wales that delivers a wide range of services to over 171,000 residents. It is one of the largest employers in the area, employing over 8,700 people.

Procurement Services within Caerphilly CBC has full visibility of the Council’s third party annual expenditure of circa £196 million. This expenditure covers Education & Corporate Services, Communities, Social Services & Housing and Business Improvement Services. Procurement is predominantly a centralized corporate function within the Council and the team either administers or has full visibility of all processes and contracts in excess of £10,000.

Objectives

The Council had a plan and long-term strategy to develop end-to-end electronic procurement with the ultimate goal of managing spend across the Council. Inefficient processes, compliance issues and limited transparency meant managing spend and ordering was difficult with minimal ability to track orders. Full purchase spend visibility, cost savings and process efficiencies were top of the agenda.

The Council also wanted to take more control of its sourcing processes by building on existing electronic systems to further streamline and improve processes and procedures to make the experience of doing business with the Council as efficient, easy and uncomplicated as possible.

Caerphilly CBC was an early adopter of eProcurement and has played a prominent and leading role in the development of eProcurement solutions across the Welsh Public Sector. Over the past 20 years the Council has embraced new technology developments that have become available through its partnership working with Proactis.
 

How Proactis helped

The Council originally implemented Proactis Purchase-to-Pay to consolidate the numerous ordering procedures and formats to capture spend across the organization. All orders are sent to suppliers electronically and an increasing number of invoices are being received electronically.

Having used Proactis for many years, it elected to utilise additional functionality available, including contract and supplier management, and adopted the collaborative procurement portal powered by the Proactis sourcing solution. This has extended visibility of contract opportunities for suppliers, while extending governance, compliance and auditability for the Council.

95% of the Council’s procurement processes are managed via Proactis Sourcing, providing extensive transparency, with built-in procedures and controls which are aligned to pre-determined authorisation criteria. The Council worked with Proactis to create streamlined, end-to-end procurement processes, including spend management and control, sourcing, contract management and supplier relationship management.

Benefits to the Council

The Council’s Procurement function has developed and implemented a complete end-to-end strategy which is supported by the use of Proactis solutions. Systems and processes have been developed as dynamic information highways with data securely flowing into and out of the organization, providing all parties with timely information that helps make all business interactions more efficient.

Supplier engagement has also vastly improved. The Council has in excess of 18,000 suppliers registered, and the Proactis solutions have ensured cost savings and process efficiencies for the Council whilst streamlining processes for it’s suppliers.

The whole procurement process has been well adopted across the Council with over 800 users. Procurement is now standardised, providing cost savings, process efficiencies, compliance and the all-important visibility.'