Council to abolish paper invoices

Kings Lynn and West Norfolk Borough Council has just gone live with a new e-procurement and electronic trading environment in its mission to abolish paper by March 2008.

EGS, a UK e-commerce exchange for the public sector and its suppliers, has supplied the Council with its IDeA:marketplace platform in a four-week implementation time.

The council has made initial savings of approximately £600,000 by revising its procurement strategy and automating its procurement processes, as well as putting spending controls in place through the EGS Exchange.

"We moved to e-procurement as part of the e-government initiative, and also decided to upgrade to a new financial system internally," said Sarah Arthurton, senior accountancy technician at the council.

The authority is now in the process of adding suppliers to the system, which will be fully rolled out to users across all Council departments by March 2008, with the aim of abolishing all paper-based invoices by that time.

Arthurton continued: "EGS' IDeA:marketplace enables us to know exactly what's being spent and who the Council is buying from. It enables us to have greater controls in place to ensure that only authorised people are buying, which significantly reduces off contract spend and maverick buying. It also provides us with valuable analysis.

"We knew who we were buying from, but previously we didn't have insight into what was being bought and in what quantities. The EGS system assigns codes against items, which gives us much greater management insight into what we're buying. This in turn means we are able to negotiate much more meaningful contracts, streamline the number of suppliers and make our processes sharper."

Dale Gagen, technical accountant for the Borough Council of Kings Lynn and West Norfolk said: "Since moving from manual processes to e-procurement, we have made in excess of £600,000 in savings by approaching procurement in a different way and having better systems in place." He also said the authority's gross annual expenditure is approximately £98 million of which approximately £9 million can be influenced. And by automating the procurement process and revising its procurement strategy, he said the council would be able to save about ten per cent of this amount.

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