SOPO Annual Conference & Exhibition 2009
Overview

SOPO Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Procurement

The SOPO Annual Conference and Exhibition 2009, held at the Hilton Deansgate, Manchester in November, was the occasion for presentation of the most recent SOPO Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Procurement. The ceremony took place at a Gala Awards Dinner on the evening of the event.

The SOPO Awards are the only national awards to specifically recognise procurement within the local government arena. Now in their eighth year, the Awards attracted a record number of entries. In addition, all submissions received under the four regular award categories to involve education (schools, colleges and universities) were considered separately under a special Education Award category, which was sponsored and evaluated by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF).

The winners:

County Council Category – Cumbria County Council

The Strategic and Commercial Procurement Unit at Cumbria County Council provide a corporate procurement service to the Council and associated bodies which in turn generates efficiency savings, facilitates improvements in service delivery, measured by sustainable outcomes and value for money, and procures quality services and supplies which are tailored to local needs.

Cumbria County Council is committed to ensuring its procurement policies and procedures are environmentally, economically, socially and ethically sustainable. With an annual non-salary expenditure of over £250 million, the Council recognises the impact its procurement has on communities and strives to ensure its procurement activity supports the achievement of corporate objectives. By adopting such an approach, the Council benefited economically, for instance through use of whole-life costing and adopting best practice in construction, and in terms of value for money (delivering over £3.5 million of cost savings); measurable improvements in environmental impact (such as reductions in carbon emissions, increased use of environmentally friendly products, reductions in waste generation and disposal, and more efficient energy use); demonstrable social impacts (including linking tendering processes to improvements in outcomes such as the provision of training and apprenticeships, and using food procurement to raise nutritional value in school and residential care home meals and the meals on wheels service) and ethical behaviour.

Alan Ratcliffe, Head of Strategic and Commercial Procurement, Resources Directorate at Cumbria County Council, who also won a SOPO Award in 2002 at Northumberland County Council, said: “I was thrilled to accept the SOPO Award on behalf of Cumbria County Council. We have made significant progress and have strived to develop an intelligent joined-up approach to ensure all our procurement activity is sustainable. The Award is testament to the commitment, enthusiasm and sheer hard work of everyone in the team.”

Unitary Council Category – Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council

Property Services at Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council provide reactive and planned building maintenance services for the Council’s property estate. The service operates as the Council’s landlord but also offers maintenance services to tenants such as schools. The value of work completed is in the region of £4 million per annum.

Traditionally, Property Services had contractors for day-to-day buildings maintenance and mechanical and electrical works and tendered each piece of planned work separately. In 2005 the proposal to establish two partnering contractors for building maintenance and mechanical and electrical works was developed between the Property Services team and the Corporate Procurement Service. The benefits would be better understanding of customer requirements; reduced overall cost of acquisition; the opportunity to harmonise processes with resultant efficiencies; a reduction in duplication of effort; and improved management of performance.

The Dodd Group and Ian Williams won the contracts and initially contract savings of £141,000 were collected; average job costs have also fallen.

The ICT systems used by the Council and their partners have been interfaced so that appointments can be made for customers and works orders raised in partners’ systems by council staff. The partners have invested in hand-held technologies to improve efficiency, route planning and response times for customers.

Both partners feel better able to plan their work with Solihull and have been willing to invest in staff development and technology because of the length of the contracts, with a resultant improvement in efficiency and effectiveness on both sides.

Liz Welton, Corporate Procurement Manager at Solihull MBC, said: “Having been a finalist for the SOPO Awards twice before, it was an enormous pleasure to finally win an Award outright. I am very proud of all the hard work the teams and our private sector partners have invested to make these partnerships a success, so it is even more rewarding to have that success formally recognised by SOPO.”

District/Borough Council Category – Joint submission by the West Midlands Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership, the District Councils of Bromsgrove, Malvern Hills, Wychavon and Wyre Forest, the Borough Councils of Redditch and Staffordshire Moorlands, and Worcester City Council

In 2008 five district councils in Worcestershire came together to jointly tender their insurance requirements; they were later joined by a further two authorities to form a seven-authority insurance cluster to go into the market. This insurance cluster formed part of a regional pilot project to seek to obtain best value on insurance and to stimulate the marketplace.

Insurance was unanimously chosen by the seven councils as it is a significant spend category and was considered an area where potential savings could be achieved. An insurance category group was set up between the East and West Midlands Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnerships to consult and take soundings from authority insurance representatives. The general view was that forming ‘insurance cluster groups’ was a practical way forward; improved risk management and data quality are also ways to improve overall performance.

External advice was procured to ensure the data capture was of a high quality, the tender specification was comprehensive (reflecting existing service levels) and the market was proactively engaged. Leeds-based company The Risk Factor supported the seven councils throughout the process.

Contracts were awarded in April 2009 for three years, and the result has been an incredible success; savings of £1.7 million have been delivered, with some councils making over £150,000 in savings (30 per cent plus) over the contract period. A further ‘internal’ spin-off benefit is the option to reduce the administrative burden by centralising the administrative function responsible for the payment of all invoices and processing claims.

Jonathan Jones, Programme Manager - Smarter Procurement at Improvement and Efficiency West Midlands, said: “We were extremely pleased to win the Award. The project was a clear demonstration of collaboration in action to deliver savings and improvements for district authorities, and has encouraged many more authorities to do the same thing and achieve results.”

Wider Sector Category – London Fire Brigade

As the third largest Fire and Rescue Authority in the world, London Fire Brigade (LFB) has to ensure that resilience is at the core of all its critical activities. It needs to ensure its most important organisational processes and resources are protected in order to provide the highest level of service at all times. As a result, the Brigade has been undertaking Business Continuity Management within the organisation for several years now, and has a detailed understanding of its own capabilities to respond to incidents and handle all forms of business disruption.

However, as an emergency service the LFB relies heavily on a number of strategic suppliers for a range of supplies, equipment and services that feed into the Brigade’s critical activities, and many of these dependencies have the ability to disrupt the critical activities they support if the supply chain were to fail.  

In order to address this, the Brigade’s Procurement Department has developed a toolkit that the Brigade uses in order to validate the Business Continuity Management arrangements of its most strategic and critical suppliers. This toolkit has enabled the LFB to perform health checks on its suppliers’ Business Continuity Management arrangements, provide constructive comment and carry out real-time Business Continuity Management exercises in order to validate the arrangements they have documented in their plans.

This innovative toolkit has assisted the Brigade in developing a more in-depth understanding of the level of business continuity risk the service is exposed to, helped them to develop more sophisticated Business Continuity Management strategies in the event of any supply chain disruption, and given them a toolkit that they can openly share with their suppliers in order to assist them in understanding their supply chain exposures. Moreover, it has helped  the Brigade achieve the corporate objectives it has set as an organisation around ‘response’ (in terms of ensuring they and their suppliers are resilient during emergency circumstances) and around ‘resources’ (in terms of ensuring they manage risk by using their resources flexibly through resilient supply chains and having alternatives in place).

Nicol Thornton, Head of Procurement at the LFB, said: “Receiving a SOPO Award for the business continuity work we have completed with our critical suppliers was a great honour and shows that innovation in supplier relationship management has been recognised by procurement experts as a core role for procurement now and in the future.”

Education Award (sponsored by the Educational Procurement Centre of the Department for Children, Schools and Families) – Pro5

Pro5 is a group of local authority purchasing and supply consortia consisting of the Central Buying Consortium, Eastern Shires Purchasing Organisation, North Eastern Purchasing Organisation, West Mercia Supplies and Yorkshire Purchasing Organisation.

The group is committed to putting in place national contracts which can be accessed by all local authorities. Additionally, the group has been working closely with the Department for Children, Schools and Families’ commercial division since November 2007.

Collaboration with the DCSF and Pro5 has two main strands:

• enables schools to procure goods and services electronically – the DCSF marketplace known as OPEN is pivotal in achieving administrative efficiencies
• aggregates schools demand for goods and services via national contracts in which the Pro5 group engages the supply market collectively

There are already notable successes, particularly in areas where local authorities and schools have been provided with additional ring-fenced funds such as outdoor playground equipment and heavy catering equipment.

ESPO Director Ken May said: “A tremendous amount of work has been undertaken by both Pro5 and the DCSF in securing efficiencies in procurement for schools and we are delighted that this has been recognised.”