After recognising the need to transform its purchasing procedures to gain efficiency savings and a tightercontrol over spending, Brooklands College embarked on a project to source and implement an e-purchasing system.
Streamlined procedures
The previous manual system at the College relied on3-part paper requisitions and purchase orders withduplicate remittance advices and intensive labour effort. The College wanted to implement approved supplier lists, gain greater visibility and control over spend and reduce the administrative burden.
iPOS Procurement from Professional Advantage was adopted following a review and recommendation from financial systems specialist, FinanSys. "We needed tight integration with our finance system SunSystems, real-time budget checking plus an 'ease-of-use' to make the transition as straight-forward as possible for our end users" says Marko Riezebos, Purchasing Supervisor for the College.
Smooth implementation
With the cultural change that the proposed solutionwould impose it was also imperative that the solution provider had the skills and diplomacy to work effectively with users and minimise the pain involved with delivering the different working practices.
"The combination of FinanSys' knowledge of purchasing and SunSystems, together with their extensive experience of iPOS ensured a professionaland considerate implementation process" said Riezebos.
Seeing results
The implementation took just over 3 months and initially the College ran iPOS alongside the SUN PO module in the Finance office to ensure that the Finance team had sufficient expertise to guide new users before deploying to the wider audience. The functionality and lay-out of iPOS together with the ease of use significantly reduced the level of training required by all users.
Additional benefits
During the implementation process the College identified the opportunity to improve two further aspects of the purchasing cycle; reporting and remittance distribution. After advice from FinanSys the College also implemented Advanced Inquiry and e-Remit (both additional solutions from Professional Advantage).
The powerful inquiry capabilities of Advanced Inquiry allows the College to run both simple ad hoc inquiries and more complicated reports, whilst e-Remit has eliminated the need to print and post remittance advices to suppliers by sending these to creditors by email.
Marko summarises the implementation with "Brooklands College stepped in to the 21st century by implementing iPOS, Advanced Inquiry and e-Remit. All respective users are more than satisfied with the way these Professional Advantage solutions have improved and simplified the purchasing, reporting and remittance processes.
The expertise and experience of FinanSys as our solution provider was a major factor in the success of the whole process and we were impressed by the dedication andcustomer relations demonstrated."
