The Digital Marketplace made the procurement process simpler, clearer and faster for the Metropolitan Borough of Calderdale. Claire Broadbent explains how.
Describe your role
I’m the team leader for performance and business intelligence at Calderdale Council. My team is responsible for reporting statistical evidence to central government; we help make data accessible so we can analyse it and use it to improve services.
Explain the project
Calderdale Council stores data in over 170 systems. Some of these systems still rely on analysts to extract and transform data. We wanted to replace these with ones that have reporting functionality. We looked for a supplier to provide software that we could pilot.
Choosing a supplier
Lots of suppliers offer the kind of system we need and the Digital Marketplace helped us come up with a shortlist. We did some initial investigation into which one would be the best fit for our organisation and used the Digital Marketplace to find which product was the best quality at the best price. We awarded the contract to ATOS, who are now managing our licensing, training and consultancy and Qlik, a software development company who provided the software that best met our requirements.
Describe any challenges you overcame
As it’s a pilot at this stage, we wanted to minimise our spend on the project and we knew that buying through the Digital Marketplace would mean we had access to a competitive market. The transparent pricing has been invaluable too because, like all central and local government departments, we're working to a budget.
How has the Digital Marketplace made the project simpler, clearer and faster
We knew that this could be a long term project and that the rest of our organisation may use whichever piece of software we chose in the future. With this in mind, it made sense to spend as much time as possible to implement the right system and evaluate it in its pilot year. Buying through the Digital Marketplace made getting the system in place quicker. It also saved us time and resources as the terms and conditions were already set.
Describe how the end cost compared to your budget
The project came in on budget. We no longer need analysts to produce reports as the dashboards can do this now. Even at this stage of the pilot, the software has paid for itself.