Strategic Procurement Group Yorkshire & Humber

YORtender 3 Implementation

Briefly describe the initiative/ project/service; please include your aims and objectives

The project was to procure and implement a regional procurement portal for 26 public sector organisations across Yorkshire and Humberside. The main focus of this was to ensure that there was and electronic procurement portal to enable public sector tender opportunities to a wide range of suppliers The benefits of this were to create synergies working together as regional colleagues and to promote improved more commercial processes and platforms for tender management. Working together over 26 organisations all pulled together during the procurement and the implementation of the new system. Demonstrating a successful collaborative effort across Yorkshire and Humberside.

What are the key achievements?

The key achievement was to have the system live and working by the end of the current contract. Demonstrating great examples of initiative, innovation, cross functional working and successful collaboration. Other achievements included;
– Running a collaborative (virtual) procurement across 26 organisations
– Ensuring all authorities were trained on how to use the system
– Sharing of best practice
– Standardising current work flows
– Communicating crucial information under tight deadlines, to a wide range of stakeholders
– Having to be innovative to come up with solutions to fit the regional partners
– Negotiating with the incumbent supplier and the new supplier
– Effective stake holder management, across a large range of different stakeholders

How innovative is your initiative?

Using online technology due to covid and not being able to communicate and train in a face to face way was an extremely innovative way of delivering training to such a large group of different organisations. Having to liase together which each organisation to find a standard method of using the system. When this had been established rolling out training to a few representatives from each organisations through virtual training, to then cascade the training throughout their own individual organisations was a massive task and has been successfully done. Creating a common contract management module that will enable better contract management and utilisation across all of the regional partners. Having the same methodology and process will enable greatly improved benchmarking.

What are the key learning points?

The biggest learning point for this project would be to ensure that contract exit plans are detailed and in place.