Scottish Parliament goes live with ePS
Scottish Parliament joined ePS in April 2009 at very little cost to the organisation. This was a ground breaking move forward for ePS to bring on board smaller organisations
This proved a milestone for the ePS team as the Parliament were offered the option to join the Scottish Government's instance of PECOS (purchasing software). This provided Parliament an easier route at low cost with a range of savings. These included:
- no implementation fees
- no integration fees, as Parliament use the same account system as Government
- free access to the ePS toolkit
- no staff resources required to administer the system, this is managed by Government's EASEbuy team
- use of EASEbuy helpdesk
- ongoing support and development on all service areas within ePS
- networking and sharing of business ideas
The successful outcome of this implementation should not be underestimated as it took 15 months of negotiations between the Parliament and the Government's EASEbuy team. The deliverables for the implementation were ambitious and ePS maintained continuous open channels of communication to enable deadlines to be met.
This is a good example of the hub and spoke model being used to deliver shared services benefits through eProcurement Scotland and particularly relevant as public sector organisations seek to merge or share costs. The benefits of having these organisations using eProcurement Scotland should make it easier to manage procurement information and deliver the wider benefits from collaborative contracts in the future.
The Scottish Parlimanet now have 237 users and 319 suppliers onboard. Within the first 5 weeks they have put through 237 purchase orders via ePS to the value of around £10m.