Procurement Strategy 2017- 2025
Report author: James Platts, Associate Director of Procurement
Date: 23 June 2017
Version Control Sheet
Version / Date / Reviewed By / Revision Details1 / 25/9/17 / MB / Web accessibility
Table of Contents
Contents
1.Executive Summary:
2.Introduction
3.Definition of Procurement and Value for Money
4.Procurement’s alignment to University of Bradford’s Strategic objectives
5.Procurement Structure
6.Procurement Target Operating Model
7.Strategic Procurement Objectives
1.Executive Summary:
The Procurement Strategy is a key supporting strategy of the University Strategy and at its core its aim is financial sustainability. The main aim of the Strategy is to promote procurement professionalism to support all University staff in engaging with suppliers and ensuring that procurement processes and procedures are appropriate and effective in order to deliver the required quality and quantity of both services and products, on time, whilst encouraging innovation, promoting sustainability and ultimately delivering value for money.
This document sets out the University of Bradford Procurement Strategy 2017-2025 and is aligned to the University’s main Strategic Plan. The purpose of the document is to set out the short, medium and long-term objectives for the delivery of procurement improvements across the University, along with the proposed methods of managing and reporting on performance.
2.Introduction
The University of Bradford (UoB) Procurement Team promotes procurement professionalism to support all UoB staff in engaging with suppliers and ensuring that procurement processes and procedures are appropriate and effective in order to deliver the required quality and quantity of both services and products, on time, whilst encouraging innovation, promoting sustainability and ultimately delivering value for money.
This document sets out the UoB Procurement Strategy 2017-2025 and is aligned to the University’s main Strategic Plan. The purpose of the document is to set out the short, medium and long-term objectives for the delivery of procurement improvements across the University, along with the proposed methods of managing and reporting on performance.
3.Definition of Procurement and Value for Money
For the purposes of this strategy document, procurement will be defined as:
- The process whereby organisations meet their needs for goods, services, works and utilities in a way that delivers to the required quality and achieves value for money on a whole life basis in terms of the generation of sustainable, re-occurring benefits to the organisation, society and the local and wider economy.
For the purposes of this strategy document, value for money is defined as:
The most advantageous combination of cost, quality and sustainability to meet customer requirements.
In this context, cost means consideration of the whole life cost, quality means meeting a specification which is fit for purpose and sufficient to meet the customer’s requirements and sustainability means economic, social and environmental benefits, considered throughout the procurement exercise in support of the University of Bradford’s overall strategy.
4.Procurement’s alignment to University of Bradford’s Strategic objectives
The University of Bradford’s strategy has four overarching objectives; Procurement will play a major role in the support and delivery of these objectives:
- Excellence; Procurement will: Retain and recruit high quality staff, Share knowledge, train staff to a level of excellence, Educate, Enhance the quality of the campus and its facilities and Collaborate wherever possible with other excellent University/similar publicly funded, procurement teams and organisations
- Internationalisation; Procurement will support all faculties and departments in their participation in the global market as drivers of the knowledge economy, and its aim to be a world leading technology University.
- Equality and Diversity; Procurement will promote equality, diversity and inclusivity throughout its processes and in the nature in which it will interact and engage with an interdisciplinary range of suppliers, faculties and departments, whilst always showing openness, respect and humility.
- Sustainability; Procurement will help to ensure financial viability by adding to surpluses and cash flow, by reducing cost and increasing efficiencies whilst continuing to support the reduction of environmental impacts.
5.Procurement Structure
UoB currently operates a devolved procurement structure, with the central Procurement team being responsible for taking the lead on the implementation of our procurement strategy, policies and operational procurement practices, on behalf of all faculties and departments across campus. During 2017’s transitional phase, the Procurement Team will continue to support the current devolved procurement structure by providing strategic procurement direction, offering professional advice and guidance on all Procurement matters, assisting in making the procurement process more efficient and effective whilst ensuring that all staff has the necessary skills and competencies to undertake their procurement duties through facilitating appropriate training.
6.Procurement Target Operating Model
The Associate Director of Procurement will lead on the partial centralisation of Procurement services to allow the delivery of the UoB Procurement departments future operating model, this will restructure the current disjointed model that often lacks continuity of approach and will in turn provide a service from a team of trained and qualified individuals that are able to deliver a high level of excellence for all procurement and purchasing related services, from requisition production and purchase order to strategic procurement. The approach will provide optimisation of the delivery of value for money in all aspects of the purchase to pay process.
The roles of faculty and directorate purchasing staff will not significantly change and there will be no change to which faculty or directorate that the staff work for or specialise in currently. There will be UoB wide work packages that the team will work on centrally on certain days in the week, in line with availability of resource. These work packages include the University contracts database and the purchasing workplan which will be set against the needs identified by each budget holder and then used to apply the correct approach to competition by procurement and in collaboration with technical leads.
The time working within the Procurement and Insurance team will provide continual professional development, through both in-house and external training. The CPD provided will aim to train all staff to a standard that will deliver procurement excellence for UoB.
Procurement TOM Second stage implementation – Stage two will require a formal restructure of Procurement and will change the job descriptions of certain Purchasing roles. The restructure will look to slot and match all roles where the grade and role does not significantly change. All other roles where there would be a significant change in role and possibly a change in grade, would require a formal consultation process where staff that are not matched and slotted will be initially placed at risk and will then be invited to apply for the positions available within the new TOM, these posts will be opened to all purchasing staff.
The TOM will continue to be predominantly faculty and department focused, with partial focus on central activities and projects that are aimed to benefit the whole university.
7.Strategic Procurement Objectives
In order to promote procurement best practice, remain legally compliant, and to also meet UoB’s overall strategic objectives, the following key procurement objectives have been identified as priority areas for improvement:
Quality. Right product or service in line with the requirements stated by the end user and technical leads.
Embed Sustainability. To embed sound ethical, social and environmental procurement practices.
Value for money. To obtain optimum value for money for all aspects of UoB’s expenditure through sourcing, supply, and performance monitoring. Value for money equates to measures of quality as well as price. Price will take account of whole life costs in terms of costs of acquisition, costs of use, maintenance costs and end of life costs and with this the Procurement team will deliver £900k of cashable savings by July 2018.
Promote collaboration. To promote further collaboration both within UoB and externally with other Universities and the wider public sector in order to achieve economies of scale and to deliver procurement process efficiencies.
To increase the use of systems and technology. To increase the use of systems and technology to streamline the procurement process, improve efficiency, and encourage open and transparent procurement.
To encourage innovation. To encourage innovation in the provision of goods, services and works by adopting an output based approach to specification development.
To promote open and accessible competition. To advertise all tender opportunities of appropriate value levels, thereby encouraging open and fair competition.
Effective supplier engagement. To encourage more effective supplier engagement both pre-tender, in terms of soft market testing and specification development, and post-tender in terms of providing constructive feedback on tender submissions.
Staff development. To support staff development through the provision of both internal and external training and development opportunities.
Effective communication. To encourage and promote co-operation and communication between all staff with procurement responsibilities, thereby adopting a ‘one team’ approach.
Performance measurement. To measure improvement within the procurement field by inviting colleagues and peers to give feedback on our service, to also improve and reassess our service by utilising the Procurement Maturity Assessment, provided by Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium.
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