Adatis enables procurement and contract management teams across government to monitor contracts, spend and supplier performance – driving cost savings for the taxpayer and helping to mitigate supplier risk.
The Challenge.
No central visibility of contract data, leading to missed savings opportunities. With contracts fragmented across different departments, there was no way to view all of them in one place. There was also no easy way to match expenditure to contracts, and no central place to monitor supplier performance and risk. The Central Government Department knew they were missing opportunities to forecast and manage spending to deliver better value to the taxpayer. It also needed a way to spot contract- and supplier-related risk earlier, to be able to manage it more proactively. All the data needed to provide these insights was available, but it was locked up in different systems across government. A platform was needed that could bring together data from those different sources, report on it, and visualise the reports in an easy to-use way for everyone who needed to see it.
The Objective.
A central data visualisation and reporting system with self-service capabilities. Adatis worked to understand their objectives for their reporting system. The first was the ability to see accurate contract, spend and supplier data in one place. They wanted visibility of all contracts with a view to driving cost savings, reducing supplier risk and ensuring compliance with sourcing policy. Secondly, they had an ambitious aim to deliver selfservice reporting to buyers and commercial teams across the whole of central and local government, including arm’slength bodies. Users would be able to see contracts in place across government, helping them to spot collaboration opportunities and gain insight into supplier performance before making sourcing decisions. A third objective was to improve the quality of contract data. Every commercial tender over £10,000 is published on a public-facing website where businesses can find and tender for public sector work. However, the information uploaded to the site varied in quality and consistency between teams and departments, leading to duplicate and omitted data.
The Solution.
A modern cloud data warehouse with powerful self-service data visualisation. Adatis explored the systems environment and identified three initial source systems to bring together into a modern data warehouse built in the Microsoft Azure Cloud:
• Public-facing information for contract details
• Bravo for spend data against contracts
• Supplier Registration Service for supplier data
During the initial build, an opportunity was also identified to improve the volume and quality of supplier data, to enable commercial teams to make more informed procurement decisions. Adatis worked with the Central Government Department to add further source systems:
• Social media: Near-real-time import of social media sentiment towards a set of key suppliers
• APIs: Direct hook-ups via APIs into individual department systems to source data directly, negating any time-lags prior to publishing the information externally.
• Capability for new data sources: The facility to include the new data source of departmental pipelines, increasing the visibility and re-use options for this data across government.
Adatis also added a number of PowerBI reports to enable self-service reporting of key contract and supplier data, including:
• Live Contracts: Reports on spend and commitment to aid forecasting and to help identify opportunities for collaboration and consolidation.
• Supplier Insight: Reports on spend and commitment with individual suppliers, along with supplier performance data, to drive risk management and to leverage buying power across departments
• Spend Insight: Breakdown of spend across departments, suppliers categories and past trends.
• Future Procurement Activities: Reports on the volume and type of procurement activity occurring across government, to enable more consistent contracting processes
• Opportunity to Collaborate: Where departments can match contracts that are due to expire against contracts due to expire across the whole of government.
The Results.
A contract and supplier insight engine that improves procurement across government. Since the solution went live, it has delivered significant benefits to both the Central Government Department and government-wide:
• More informed procurement decisions: With a richer view of each potential supplier, including current social media sentiment towards key suppliers, commercial teams can make more informed decisions when reviewing tenders and awarding contracts.
• Improved risk management: With a central view of supplier performance data and overall spend with individual suppliers, the solution enables buying teams and departments to identify and mitigate contract- and supplier-related risk early.
• Increased value to the taxpayer: One of the key benefits of the solution is the opportunity it provides for different departments to collaborate and consolidate spend, leveraging their joint buying power to negotiate fewer and better contracts. The Central Government Department envisages a significant increase in taxpayer value as a result.
• Self-service reporting: The solution is designed to enable self-service reporting for thousands of buyers and contract management teams across central and local government, as well as arm’s length bodies.