Social Responsibility

Make bottom-line savings and improve
your corporate social responsibility image

 Joined-up e-Procurement from the Imaginist Consortium

Are you contributing to the longer-term sustainability of local business communities in the countries in which you trade?

Do you know which of your suppliers employ local people and what proportion of the local economies are represented by what you buy from them?

Do you have a procurement strategy that gives you a positive corporate social responsibility profile while improving your bottom line profits?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, you need Joined-up e-Procurement

 An enlightened approach to modernising purchasing

e-Procurement is not all about slashing the number of suppliers and using prime contractors to push costs down the supply chain. Short-term it may look attractive, but longer-term you may:

• lose flexibility and responsiveness from your suppliers
• experience lower quality of service from large suppliers
• have problems in changing strategic direction and creating new initiatives
• lack the skills to opt to bring the services back into your organisation at the end of the contract
• distance yourself from your relationship with your local community, from where you draw your workforce
• reduce your ability to achieve local corporate social responsibility targets

These will all have an impact on your profits. And its unnecessary.

Joined-up e-Procurement is a unique approach to implementing e-procurement, developed by the Imaginist Consortium in response to working with UK Local Authorities who were looking for ways to reconcile their need to reduce the cost of purchasing with their responsibility for the sustainability of their local communities. Joined-up e-Procurement satisfies both requirements.

It recognises that local companies can often deliver better value, provided they work within an e-enabled and supported compliance framework.

If you haven't got a coherent approach that links your e-procurement and corporate social responsibility strategies, you need Joined-up e-Procurement.

 How do we do it?

The Imaginist Consortium created the One-Step-at-a-Time™ methodology to ensure that you optimise your procurement processes, bringing not just the Board and your buyers along with you, but involving your suppliers, particularly those which represent real value to you.

Where these are smaller local companies, the approach ensures that the necessary support is provided so that they can continue to play a part in your success in the future.

	One-Step-at-a-Time™ comprises: Supplier analysis Impact assessment Business case Free-text e-ordering Low-cost buy-side solution Free supply-side solution Buyer decision tool Ongoing savings One-Step-at-a-Time™ brings cost benefits within months, ensuring that you are hitting corporate objectives to make efficiency savings while bringing the company positive PR for social responsibility.

 What is the first step?

A consultation meeting with one of our experienced consultants will capture where you are now and where you want to be. We will then build an implementation road-map and give you some indications of cost and benefit targets. If these meet your expectations, we will work with you to carry out an initial pilot project to prove the concept.

 The Imaginist Consortium

We brought together a group of best-of-breed companies to help us deliver Joined-up e-Procurement. They include:

	The Imaginist Company leading the development and promotion of best practice in e-procurement and supplier adoption in both private and public sectors @UKPLC integrated supplier portals, e-procurement solutions, supplier recruitment, e-commerce enablement DueNorth developers of e-procurement supplier portals, e-quote and tendering applications Evalue Limited hands-on procurement and e-procurement consultancy, working with private and public sector organisations Exor Management Services supplier accreditation and risk management services Local Futures impact assessment analysis & correlation to local economic and skills data Spikes Cavell & Co supplier analysis, matching to financial and other company data records Springboard4business e-business research and training SPS best practice consultancy services, procurement classification experts

Find out how you could make efficiency savings while playing a prominent supporting role for your local business community that will reap market image benefits for years to come.

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