South Tyneside Council: Gaining market intelligence and improving collaboration with Insights
Peter Lawton, Procurement Lead, explains how Insights Pre-Procurement and Spend helps South Tyneside Council define its strategy and approach.
The Challenge
South Tyneside Council has an annual procurement spend of over £320m. The Council could see its own spend data, but it was challenging to get a holistic picture that could provide the team with intelligence about the overall market, how spend compared with other councils, and supplier vulnerabilities.
The Solution
South Tyneside Council now use Oxygen Insights to provide a comprehensive view of spend data for the Council and other public bodies, including detailed information on suppliers and contracts so the Council can better understand the overall market.
Having access to readily available data to inform decision making has proved valuable in improving supplier relationships, reducing risk, saving valuable time, and bolstering collaboration.
Peter Lawton, Procurement Lead at South Tyneside, explains how Insights Pre-Procurement and Spend help the Council to refine their strategies and approaches to procurement, so that they can optimise service delivery and create better value for residents and the community.
"The advantage we gain from Insights is twofold. Firstly, by having access to readily available market intelligence. Whilst we could see our spend data and what we were spending in a particular category, it was challenging to get a holistic picture that could inform us about the overall market, including how we compared with other councils and supplier vulnerabilities.
We can now see how reliant a supplier is on us and conversely how reliant we are on a supplier as well. Being able to see this information immediately means we can make sure we manage those relationships and adapt our strategies going forward.
As an example, by using Insights Pre-Procurement and Spend, we realised an over-dependence on our homecare provider. Looking at other authorities, we noticed a trend in splitting up homecare into zones reducing risk of dependency. We’ve now adopted this approach thanks to Insights.
The second key benefit we gain is improved collaboration; the notices and the information that we see from other councils within the system is really useful when we're looking at strategies, how we can work together and make use of available resources and the experience of other councils.
I would highly recommend Insights. It gives you really useful data and market intelligence that you might not be able to gain from your own financial management system and helps you to see how you compare within your region or in the national standings against a commodity as well."
Peter Lawton,
Procurement Lead, South Tyneside Council