Confidential Client – Public Sector

Weston Management Services provided outsourced vendor management expertise to this public sector customer.

Successful outcomes were achieved through identification and implementation of enhanced business practices, influencing spend behaviours of the actual budget holders, uplifting the level of compliance and governance and the provision of detailed management information reports.

The programme entailed ensuring that the persons responsible for budgets spend did so in accordance with the clients’ company policies and procedures and in-line with the contractual agreements (Framework or Single Party) that has been put in place by the Procurement Department. The Contracts Management Department was also responsible for ensuring that the vendors providing the services adhered to the terms and conditions of their agreements with the client by measuring and monitoring agreed Key Performance Indicators and Service Level Agreements and the application of programme specific Performance Regime abatements where required. This involved working with the client’s contracts management and procurement teams, ensuring that appropriate service level agreements and key performance indicators were included in legal documentation to allow for the arrangements above to be implemented. We also implemented a Service Audit team that actively visited site works and confirmed receipt of service provision in line with the vendors’ contractual obligations.

Early on in the programme, Weston Management Services consultants identified that the client’s ERP system was significantly underutilised and that management information reports were neither readily available nor inherently meaningful. The scope of the programme was then expanded to include the development of systems and processes in SAP to rectify this matter. Through end-user engagement via workshops, a final process was developed, implemented and rolled out that now allows remote independent interrogation and confirmation of adherence to policiesand budget and also provides in-depth analysis of budget spend providing the platform for cost benefit decisions to be made. As the systems allowed for quick and accurate confirmation of service receipt, the procure-to-pay cycle time was dramatically reduced, leading to overall cost efficiencies, not least in the reduction of late payment penalties public bodies are obliged to automatically pay.

The system was audited by our client’s own Internal Audit group and was recognised as a significant advancement of corporate requirements for a transparently compliant procurement and operational process to manage outsourced services.