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@UK PLC

@UK PLC created SpendInsight as a by product of fundamental research into product data.  The research was designed to create a product aware search engine, and was a result of a KTP project with University of Reading and Goldsmiths College London.

As part of the research product data was collected from buying organisations, and the data was cleansed and matched, to provide the organisations that took part in the initial research a quick benchmark was produced which showed that all organisations studied could make significant savings as a result of using the system.

London Procurement Programme LPP picked up on the benefits of the system and helped turn it into a commercial Spend Analysis system by ensuring that the front end met the needs of the LPP member trusts and assisting with the roll out to the 71 LPP member trusts.

@UK PLC realised back in 2002 that there were significant cash-able savings from implementing electronic procurement since there is a large amount of maverick spend in large organisations, and that this spend is typically at list price even though the organisation have got good contract prices.

However, there has been a significant difficulty in estimating how much the savings would be if all items were purchased at the correct price, since the purchase were often in the form of free text or phone orders, and their was no record in the accounts payable systems of the prices paid for individual items.

SpendInsight now makes it possible to look into the free text purchase orders and reconcile these against the invoice totals so that all orders can be analysed.  This results in it being possible to look at all items purchased by an organisation and this shows that there are significant savings available through the improvement in process and elimination of maverick spending and the raising of free text orders for contract items that should be in catalogues.  Maverick spend  items are often purchased at 40% or more above contract prices.

The @UK PLC marketplace and purchase to pay P2P system automates this process and with over 1 million users is probably the best used marketplace and P2P in the world.

In addition to the cashable process savings, there are additional savings that can be made from improved procurement now that the entire range of items purchased can be benchmarked.  These saving tend to be smaller incremental savings than the saving on maverick spend and are in the region of 5-10%.  However there are areas where no contract has been negotiated where significantly higher savings are possible.

Previously the process of Spend Analysis was manual and was a significant financial leap of faith by procurement or finance due to the high costs and resource required to undertake a project.

SpendInsight breaks this barrier by fully automating the process, and @UK PLC would like to thank its fellow development partners:-

• University of Reading
• Goldsmiths College London
• London Procurement Programme and
• Knowledge Transfer Partnerships

Along with the @UK PLC research team and the @UK PLC development team for there help in creating the Spend Insight Spend Analysis system.