Value For Money Procurement Benchmarking
Overview
Public sector efficiency is high on the agenda of the UK government. Due to their impact on efficiency, corporate services will continue to be a strong focus of attention. The UK’s public sector audit agencies have developed indicator sets to measure the value for money performance of five core functions: finance, human resources, information and communication technology, estates management and procurement.
Information based on the indicators is already helping senior managers make strategic decisions, and contributing to the delivery of improved organisational outcomes. The indicators have helped organisations right across the public sector to understand, compare and demonstrate the value for money performance of their corporate services.
The UK Audit bodies have approved six organisations to provide the VFM Benchmarking service. PI Group is one of the approved organisations, and they have partnered with carefully selected specialist value adding partners to deliver the solution.
Stenmoore Consulting are the selected specialist partner for the Procurement indicator sets, and will provide access via PI Group, to all specialist partners for the defined Corporate Services.
The VFM Benchmarking solution will enable you to identify specific, achievable, and deliverable targets to drive improvement within your organisation. The solution will also enable you to:
- benchmark your performance against comparable organisations.
- develop an improvement and realisation plan to deliver the benefits identified.
VFM Methodology
The VFM methodology is very straightforward:
- Collect the data
- Input the data into the VFM web based tool
- Data will be validated by PI and its Service Specialist Partners – any gaps or shortcomings will be communicated to the relevant organisation. (Validation for this purpose will cover missing fields, out of range numbers and inconsistent statements).
- Validated data will be re – input as required
- Reports for each individual Corporate Service will be issued to the relevant organisation
- Comparative reports will also be issued detailing the relative performance against peer group organisations within Wales and as and when available, the rest of the UK.
To maximise the benefit from this activity the data input for each of the indices must be accurate, comprehensive and delivered to PI in accordance with agreed timetables. This is especially true for the Procurement indices – with special regard to the data for Primary Procurement Indicators 1 and 4.
As an additional Value Add service, PI’s Corporate Service specialist Partners will be available to review the data prior to input, and, if required to obtain the data from the Client organisation. We recognise that obtaining this data can be time consuming and not all Clients will have the necessary resources available to undertake data mining on the required scale.
PI’s Reports will be fully compliant with all indices as currently specified. To ensure that the Reports are “future proof” PI will, to the greatest extent possible, also include indices that PI is already recommending the Audit bodies adopt.
Best Practice Dissemination – Workshops
The Reports generated will identify best practice and highlight opportunities for improvement for many Client organisations. However, in Stenmoore’s experience the benefits realisation plan is often the area most neglected across the UK public sector. The key opportunities identified need to be transformed into detailed and measurable benefits which can be tracked. Delivery of benefits must be measured against expectations and targets including cashable and non – cashable benefits.
We propose offering interested Clients workshop forums to develop a benefits realisation methodology – including mentoring support if required during the implementation phase.
About Purchasing Index (UK) Limited
Purchasing (UK) Limited was founded in 1982 with operations in the UK, Australia, and South Africa. PI provides mainly but not exclusively Procurement Related Benchmarking Services to the public and private sectors. PI’s primary expertise is the development and management of Benchmarking applications of various kinds including particularly the Benchmarking of Procurement Processes, their pricing outcomes and the measurement, analyses and context of business unit expenditure on third party supplied Goods and Services.
PI's services and technology has been certified under ISO27001 for data security. Its Benchmarking methodologies have been audited and approved by the National Audit Office.
VFM Benchmarking Service
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