Bourne Leisure manages spending

The Bourne Leisure Group is to implement a new, on-demand purchase-to-pay web portal to help streamline its procurement spending and processes.

The UK holiday and caravan park owner of Haven Holidays, Warner Breaks and Butlins, has chosen e-procurement systems that it hopes will ultimately allow 12,000 group employees working at over 50 UK holiday sites to browse and order goods and services from approved suppliers via a central e-procurement system.

Simon Crawshaw, IT and procurement director at Bourne Leisure told IT PRO the decision to move to standardised e-procurement systems, that will also move the business away from paper-based processes, came about as a result of being put in charge of procurement a while ago.

"My view was this was an area we knew we could get better value from and, with my IT knowledge, I knew there were systems out there that could automate this part of the business," he said.

He added that the systems developed through the appointment of specialist spend management systems provider Wax Digital will capture all spend from the purchase of paper clips to flat screen televisions and will be first deployed to Haven Holidays in a staged rollout.

The complete purchase-to-pay cycle is covered from building requisitions and getting them approved, through budget management and placing orders on suppliers, goods receipting and invoice matching.

"Ultimately this system will allow us to better understand our key areas of spend; currently our staff might buy the same products from many different suppliers at a range of price points," said Crawshaw."We want to introduce control and compliance, ensuring staff use approved suppliers and prices, whilst helping them do their jobs more efficiently and effectively with a single point of access for whatever they need."

Miya Knights

A 25-year veteran enterprise technology expert, Miya Knights applies her deep understanding of technology gained through her journalism career to both her role as a consultant and as director at Retail Technology Magazine, which she helped shape over the past 17 years. Miya was educated at Oxford University, earning a master’s degree in English.

Her role as a journalist has seen her write for many of the leading technology publishers in the UK such as ITPro, TechWeekEurope, CIO UK, Computer Weekly, and also a number of national newspapers including The Times, Independent, and Financial Times.