North West Improvement and Efficiency Partnership

Bargain Hunt a Winner!

The NWCE Bargain Hunt event, held this week (03.10.2006) was a tremendous success, with feedback so far being excellent.  Presentations from the day can now be found here.

Feedback is always welcome, if you attended this event please help us to continually improve by completing our feedback survey.

Labour Party Conference

As stated in last week's update, the North West Centre of Excellence, North West e-Government Group and North West Improvement Network hosted the “Joining up the drive for improvement” stand at the Labour Party Conference.  The conference was a great success and gave us the opportunity to promote our work with the ministers who visited the stand.

The official pictures of of our stand can now be viewed.  Please view using the following link - http://www.guspix.com/labour/annual06/stands/northwestcentre%20/index.html

Procurement Card Supplier Adoption

The Procurement Card project has been working with the Barclays Supplier Adoption team around the usage of cards. Please download a presentation outlining the main findings.  Barclays have made available a supplier adoption manager to work with councils within the region. If you would like further details please email neil.hind@hind.co.uk.

Purchase Spend Analysis - Spikes Cavell Observatory - Enhancements and Changes

There have been changes to the Spikes Cavell Purchase Spend Analysis observatory.  The Observatory is now accessed from http://observatory.spikescavell.net or by clicking on the 'login here' link on the Spikes Cavell home page.

Enhancements include:

The roll out of the Co pare analytical tool, designed to allow the procurement practitioner to easily produce comparative statistics and key indicators that help in understanding a local authority's position, relative to others in the Public Sector.

Proclass Classification - Spikes Cavell have undertaken the task of mapping all Thomson categories to all three levels of Proclass procurement classifications which will provide ready made spend category groupings, as requested by a number of Observatory Users.

For full details of the enhancements and changes please click here.

Purchasing Cards 

The 2005 Annual Report concerning the Government Procurement Card has just been published.  Details are available at www.purchasingcard.info 

EVENTS

Stationery Visit - 19.10.2006

The NWCE have been working with OGC on better use of existing stationery agreements available to North West authorities. Over the past few weeks, around £750k of savings have been identified with those organizations involved to date. As part of this work Office Depot have agreed to make their best government deals available to all local authorities within the North West and to assist in the migration. This could result in multi million pound savings for the region on stationery procurement. 

As part of this process the NWCE and Office Depot are holding an open day on 19th October. View the full agenda.

As places are limited please contact Shirley Frost via 08704 416 3056 or Shirley.frost@officedepot.com.

Discussions are underway with other stationery firms in the region. Please contact neil.hind@hind.co.uk if you need further details.

Calling all Change Agents

The Yorkshire and the Humber Regional Centre of Excellence (Y&H RCE) is leading on the development of a national delivery plan for corporate and transactional services (C&TS) in local government. The Department for Communities and Local Government is making recommendations to local government in respect of Shared Services, this will take the form of a sector plan for shared services. This could, as you know, have a profound impact on the agenda for local government in delivering shared services.

In this regard, a workshop, chaired by Stephen Barnes, Chief Executive of Pendle BC, will take place on 2nd November 2006 2.00pm to 4.30pm with lunch served from 1.00pm.  All Chief Executives and Council Leaders have been invited to attend. 

For further information please contact Adam Neil at the NWCE. 

Agency Staffing Project Engagement Day 03.11.06

The NWCE in partnership with AGMA are pleased to announce Agency Staffing Project Engagement Day.  Public Sector expenditure on Agency Workers across the UK is estimated be in the region of £12 billion per annum and is believed to be in excess of £50 million purely with AGMA.

As you may be aware the AGMA Agency Staffing Project is progressing well and has completed a quick win exercise that could save over £2million across the eleven participating authorities and associations.  The success of the project to date demonstrates the power of true organisational collaboration. Not only will each organisation gain substantial ‘cash’ savings and streamlined processes, but a new model would afford greater control over the quality of agency workers for all parties.

This event will demonstrate with further single authority and collaborative case studies from Lancashire, Southwark, Fulham and the OGC  (who in partnership with the London RCE have developed a toolkit for agency Staff projects) how this process is already proved to work. We will take you through all the phases of the project, from Pre-Implementation to Delivery right through to What Happens Next and Future Operations.

The event will be held in Manchester (Barbirolli Square) on Friday 3rd November.  Click here to see agenda and to learn more please click here 

To register for this event please email bev.brooks@tameside.gov.uk with names of those who you would like to attend.  Numbers are limited so will be allocated on a first served basis.  We look forward to seeing you there.

NWeGG Annual Conference - 07.11.2006

An exciting agenda has been put together for this event, including keynote addresses from the Implementation Plan’s architect, the Head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, Ian Watmore, and John Suffolk, the new Government CIO, who will be outlining his vision and plans for the future.  Please see the attached brochure for a full outline of the day’s plenary and seminar sessions or visit our website at www.govnet.co.uk/nwegg

During the afternoon, Sir David Varney is speaking on Transforming the Delivery of Public Services and Peter Ryder, President of SOCITM will be delivering a paper on how to Harness technology for transformational change and efficiency gains. Kate Silver, Implementation Manager, Government IT Profession at the Cabinet Office, will provide critical insights into Developing IT Professionalism and Skills and complimenting the plenary programme will be a series of workshop sessions including: Multi-agency Information Sharing; Government Connect; Tackling Social Exclusion; Putting the Customer First; and Joining up Services across Organisations.