Progressive forces to save on IT procurement
Durham Constabulary and Northumbria Police have adopted a price policing tool (IT buying tool) in a joint landmark move to reduce IT procurement costs as part of an overall efficiency drive. The new approach is expected to save time and money, and streamline current processes.
IT represents one of the largest areas of indirect procurement spend and as a volatile marketplace where price and stock can fluctuate, it tests buyers trying to achieve sustained best value on purchases.
The buying tool, Mercato ITelligence, informs users in real-time what margin their supplier is offering, so empowering buyers to quickly negotiate better value deals and benchmark against existing agreements. Buyers simply input their preferred supplier product lists or spot checks online, which are compared to trade price and stock of 500,000 product lines within the UK IT supply chain.
With management reports and forecasting facilities, it regularly saves three to 24 per cent on IT budgets and cuts time spent manually carrying out supplier comparisons.
Durham Constabulary alone has a huge demand for purchase of IT hardware, software, peripherals and consumables, which falls within a seven-figure IT budget. Specifying, sourcing and buying this amount of products at best value consumes considerable time across a small team from IT and procurement.
Durham Constabulary and Northumbria Police already employ Chartered Institute of Purchase and Supply (CIPS) best practice approaches to buying under government framework agreements and EU Procurement Directives. However, the volatile IT market and supply chain make gathering suppliers information very difficult when having to make informed buying decisions.
Both forces procurement and IT teams worked collaboratively to assess and engage ITelligence.
Marie Dale MCIPS (Member of the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply), contracts manager at Durham Constabulary, said: For the first time, we will have knowledge of our suppliers actual cost prices.
This will provide negotiation from a position of strength and help us quickly save money on buying IT while promoting an open and collaborative supplier relationship. On that basis we expect to validate best practice, best value on every purchase and return on investment (ROI) within weeks.