Croydon Council spend over £549m with external suppliers every year, bought through a 24-person procurement team.

As part of a review of their procurement processes the team found that they needed a pipeline management solution, especially in light of upcoming legislation changes which require any contracting authority spending over £200m each year to publish its procurement pipeline.

Like many councils, the team had previously relied on a master spreadsheet to track both their procurement pipeline and contract register. During the review they identified the need for a new reliable and easy-to-use solution that would meet the team’s user access, data integrity and reporting needs.

The procurement team conducted a market investigation to evaluate the available solutions. They also talked to other councils, and found the majority were also still using spreadsheets.

Unable to find a suitable solution on the open market, they briefed the council’s internal software development team, but other priorities unfortunately meant a lengthy wait before development could begin, so the Council approached Oxygen.

Pipeline Manager from Oxygen is the only Procurement Forward Plan tool created with Local Authorities in mind. Pipeline Manager met the Council’s user access management, security, audit trail, and monitoring requirements, with custom fields that could be added to meet their individual needs.

The tool enables the procurement team to import their existing data and link related procurement events together in order to accurately track procurement events from pipeline through to contract management.

The data can show the complete picture, aiding in prioritisation, workload management, and providing actionable business intelligence. Exporting to CSV is easy, and meets with National Procurement Policy Statement procurement transparency rules.

The team is now using Pipeline Manager to track tenders and contracts across over 500 procurement projects, with the ability to add as much supporting detail to each event as needed. Benefits include a better audit trail, easier data input, improved data integrity, single sign on and ability to access from anywhere.

Scott Funnell, Head of Strategic Procurement at Croydon Council, said; “Our spreadsheet-based pipeline and contract register needed improvements and was not giving us the holistic view we desired. We realised the Oxygen Finance Pipeline Manager met our needs.

“Oxygen listened to our requirements, and I was very impressed with the speed of implementation. We’re delighted with Pipeline Manager and happily recommend it to other procurement teams.”