Best Practice Procurement Cuts Costs for Cheshire

Cheshire County Council provides environmental, community and children's services to 672,000 people in Cheshire. It is the 14th-largest local authority in England and Wales. The council wanted to capture and analyze purchasing data to gain insight into spends and identify best-value suppliers and best-value products. The challenges were to drive out cost by automating and Web-enabling the procure-to-pay process for as many goods and services as possible and reduce the need for paper-based ordering and invoicing. The company used Oracle Advanced Procurement to standardize purchasing processes across all departments, enforce use of purchase orders for each transaction, and create single supplier database.