NEP Survey to Pay Business Management System.

Descriptions

North East Procurement (NEP) was established in 2008 as a North East focused consortium of social landlords, formed to provide efficiencies in the supply chain and deliver social value for Members.NEP provides a consortium procurement service, which allows social landlords (Members) (and potentially other organisations) access to a number of labour and material Frameworks all of which have been procured following the publication of an OJEU Contract Notice and following Public Procurement Rules.The Frameworks currently cover elements required by NEP Members to manage their housing stock and support their tenants e.g. Materials (kitchens, electrical, roofing, bathrooms etc.), Labour (installations, repairs etc), Consultants and more. Primarily the Frameworks cover the provision of labour and materials.NEP offers efficiencies by providing its Members with the ability to aggregate spend and so increase buying power. The purchasing of labour and materials by Members is managed using a P2P system (currently provided by the third party business integrator) on a transactional basis. The system enables NEP to monitor and track transactions.NEP wishes to replace it"s current P2P system with a Survey to Pay Business Management System.Fundamentally the aim of any future delivery model is to create/use a platform that enables Members and potential other organisations to purchase labour, materials and services (and potentially others) from contractors and suppliers through exchanges of electronic data.NEP has identified at a very high level an overview of the requirements of any future IT system. These include:1. A Catalogue Management System.The solution should support the creation, continuous manipulation and update of e-catalogues that contain rates, prices and associated activities and products for labour, materials and services.2. Functionality for Contractors and Suppliers to Self-Manage Catalogue Amendments in a Controlled Environment.The data that forms e-catalogues should be able to be populated initially from information sourced at a tender stage. Functionality is required that enables contractors and suppliers to self-manage e-catalogues and deal with price and product changes within a controlled environment.3. Input of Varying Requirements and Designs.The solution needs to accommodate requirements that arise in a number of different ways, including:— Planned Transactions (discrete material purchases with and without associated labour;— Responsive Transactions as a result of maintenance calls or other activity undertaken by Direct Labour Organisations (DLOs); and— Project or Scheme Designs (comprising a significant number of related and dependent Transactions).The solution should provide the ability to handle each transaction as a discrete order at the same time as retaining the integrity of transactions bundled into a single requirement, arising from any of the approaches described above.4. Functionality to Manipulate, Create, Update and amend Catalogues to suit customer requirements.Competition processes require NEP, or in some instances Members themselves, to be able to prepare tender documents, labour and material specifications particularly, and to issue these to Contractors and Suppliers to respond to. Clearly the ability for e-catalogues to be created at source at the time of a competition process prevents any subsequent need for tender documentation to then have to be converted from one format to another. Any future IT solution needs to provide the functionality for e-catalogues to be accessed so that prices, quantities and availability etc. can be assessed but also so that landlords can run competition processes between Contractors and Suppliers.It is an aspiration that project requirements, competition processes particularly and orders be created as simply as possible by the push of a button. This therefore requires as much auto-population of data throughout and across each process as possible.5. An Ordering and Invoicing Tool.Call offs from a Framework form part of a more general Procure to Pay Process (P2P). An ordering and invoicing tool is required to enable Members, Contractors and Suppliers to interact for ordering, confirmation of goods and services received and invoicing purposes.6. An Elemental Costing Tool / Reporting Suite.There needs to be functionality that will enable customers to track activities and costs at an elemental level, this could be different per Member i.e. at a property, product or work-stream level.Any future solution needs to allow projects to be established, delivered and reported on at levels determined by Members to suit individual needs. For example, Members need the ability to drill down to an individual property / address basis and to consider costs and activities accordingly. Any future solution needs to be able to analyse facts, highlight discrepancies and to help provide a mechanism to resolving these.7. A Rebate and Fee Collection Tool.NEP currently operates on a rebate and fee structure basis i.e. in broad terms, fees are added to labour and material prices and rates. There needs to be functionality to enable different fees and rebates to be added and for these to be tracked, invoiced / credited accurately as part of any overall P2P function. NEP is also willing to consider other forms of fee structures if the bidder considers them more attractive for NEP, such as fixed service charges and automated fee payments against transactions. The basis of any complementary commercial options must be described in the relevant section below, with the supporting functionality described under this requirement heading.8. Integration/Platform Connectivity.Because NEP is a consortium and its Members have their own internal finance / contract management / asset management arrangements and systems, a key to the success of any future NEP IT solution is the ability for it to interact and connect with these other systems. Where possible, any future IT solution should be effectively integrated with the systems of individual Members (and other potential organisations) or be able to provide comprehensive and flexible export of data using common languages and formats.9. Category Management Control Panel.NEP works with a number of different Members currently (and potential other organisations in future) as well as huge number of different Contractors and Suppliers. The labour and material supply chains need to be category managed so that service delivery arrangements and efficiencies can be optimised for individual Members and across the NEP consortium as a whole.Category management arrangements need to integrate and operate within the IT platform ensuring that catalogues are up to date and reflective of the needs of those who use them. Category management needs to be able to support Members in making call offs, whether they be direct award or by way of a competition, and through product and material selection particularly, as well as specification development.10. Cost Management and Reporting.Capabilities of the solution need to extend beyond P2P so that it provides and facilitates business management and reporting processes enabling users to model and visualise activities on demand. This needs to include spend analysis against contractors and suppliers and component accounting at levels which can be determined by individual landlords (and others) to suit their requirements.