Testimonials

'It's really useful because we can look at the information from all different angles and it's so easy to use,' says Ms Hamilton. 'It will help us rationalise and standardise our suppliers and products, which in turn means we can get better prices.'

Vicki Hamilton, The Head of Procurement and Supplies for the Outer South East London Shared Procurement
London Procurement Program

Latest News

27/01/2010
SpendInsight provides guaranteed savings
@UK PLC now guarantees that customers will achieve savings using spend insight

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SpendInsight History and Background

SpendInsight was developed as a practical first step for our eProcurement clients. When we implement eProcurement, generally we are faced with a mass of data sitting in a number of back office systems. Analysing where best value lies in all of this, has traditionally been a laborious job, and one which slows down the adoption of new systems and processes.

It is clear that our clients have the potential to make significant savings, however identifying, prioritising and actioning these is challenging especially in large complex organisations.

We set out to create a technology driven solution which could give us the answers we required quickly and at low cost. Following a 3 year research project with University of Reading and Goldsmith College, SpendInsight is delivering the results we hoped for. For the last 12 months of the product development cycle we worked with an NHS body - The London Procurement Programme - to analysis the spend of the London NHS Trusts. The technology performed well and coped with with this very large task, London's spend is around 25% of all NHS spend.

SpendInsight was created by @UK PLC as part of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with University of Reading and Goldsmiths College London, using 30 years of UK government purchasing data collected by @UK PLC subsidiary Coding International.

Coding International was part of the public sector until it was privatised in 2000. It's role was to manage and develop a standardised coding and classification structure across all public bodies. This system 'The national Supplier Vocabulary' NSV, operated at line item level and could identify individual items, multiple vendors and functional equivalents as well as pricing and pack sizes. This level of granularity meant that apples were always compared to apples, and pricing fluctuations and sourcing opportunities were easily available to buyers.

At the outset of the project Coding International had a complete view of the 500,000 most commonly bought items across the public sector and a 30 year history of pricing and changes in manufacturers part numbers. They have continued to enhance this and create new codes for clients using NSV for their coding and classification.

The KTP team worked with Coding International to understand the structure of the data and how individuals approached the creation of a new classification. This human thinking was then developed into the artificial intelligence that underlies the technological tool.

SpendInsight is an intelligent agent which can apply anything from simple matching to a product classification, through to complex decision trees and attribute search. As it processes more data it learns and continues to deepen it's capability to extract value from client data in all shapes and forms.