Glasgow City Councilsaved £20m in
less than two years in what it claims is one of the UK's biggest
public sectore-procurement projects.
The council has saved about £19m by cutting its suppliers from
about 20,000 to 8,250, and a further £1m by cutting staff time and
printing costs.
Glasgow, which went live with the project in February last year,
has rolled out the e-procurement system to 3,500 staff and has
plans to roll it out to 1,500 more in education services by
December.
Andy Kyte, a vice-president and research fellow at Gartner, said
public sector savings of this size should be happening more
regularly.
"Hopefully the significant savings at Glasgow will be a beacon
to be quickly seized upon by council leaders across the country,
who will start to ask the tough questions about what they need to
do to achieve the same value for money for their rate payers," he
said.
John Sherry, e-procurement project manager at the council, said,
"93% of transactions now go through this system, so we are saving
massive amounts of paper. We do not have as many people supporting
invoice processing as before, freeing them up to work on other
areas."
The council has rolled out an electronic invoicing system from
Kewill and a web-based ordering system, called Pecos, which links
to its back-office SAP system. Suppliers connect to the council
either by cXML,
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) or e-mail.
Before the system was implemented each department used any of 50
different ordering systems. Under the new system, users go into an
electronic catalogue and buy what they need. Invoices are produced
electronically. Most of the council's larger suppliers are linked
up to the system, and the focus over the next 18 months will be
bringing smaller suppliers on board, said Sherry.
E-Procurement Scotland, which provides software and support for
councils implementing projects, said that Glasgow had achieved big
savings because it had ran the project "by the book."
"They have done it properly. If you look across the whole public
sector, some places are more effective and rigorous than others
when implementing e-procurement. It is no surprise that they did
well because they did it by the book," said Ian Burdon, the
programme sponsor for E-Procurement Scotland.