Transforming procurement to ensure best value
Established in 1956, Unicef UK is a registered charity and one of 33 National Committees for UNICEF who support UNICEF’s mission in their territories, predominantly through fundraising and advocacy. For the last 25 years Unicef UK has worked tirelessly to raise funds for UNICEF and to advocate for children’s rights. They operate directly in the UK to ensure children’s rights are upheld by governments at home and abroad, deliver domestic initiatives and secure visibility for the world’s most vulnerable children.
Unicef UK engaged eXceeding to run a procurement review. After a full review of their spend, we helped to classify their spend and identified areas across key business units – such as FM, Marketing and IT – where savings could be made. We then worked with key stakeholders to help to execute these recommendations.
The report included everything from internal process and procedures to tools and systems and internal governance. We helped to rewrite their procurement policy as well as rolling out new tools and controls to improve visibility and compliance.
In addition to short term quick wins, we also provided recommendations on long-term strategy and suggestions on a transformational approach. Its essential that recommendations fit the organisation and culture to ensure adoption.
It was identified that there were 3 key challenges, that needed to be considered:
No centralised procurement function
Procurement had been devolved to business units leading to inconsistency and prioritisation issues
Market insights
Assessing value for money was challenging due to an internal lack of market data and category knowledge
Tools and processes
Without supporting tools and processes, visibility of spend data was difficult
eXceeding’s role was to review Unicef’s procurement function and to make recommendations both in terms of cost savings, and processes and procedures, as follows:
eXceeding reviewed our procurement policies and helped us to better understand our spend. Their consultant took the time to understand our needs, in terms of compliance and internal processes, before making recommendations which ultimately resulted in cost savings and a more efficient – and consistent – way of working with our suppliers. Thanks to eXceeding we now have the tools in place to monitor spend and performance across our supply chain.
YMCA St Pauls appointed eXceeding to review multiple contracts they had in place to run 28 buildings. Our consultants conducted a strategic review, before working with YMCA to consolidate their suppliers, create consistent contracts and ensure firm SLAs and KPIs were in place to meet their specific needs.
Through engaging eXceeding, they were able to benefit from significant cost savings across their IT and WAN outsourcing providers.
HASSRA required a full OJEU aligned procurement process for one of its biggest membership benefits – cinema tickets. eXceeding ran the entire tender process through to the transition to a new supplier.
