Albertsons
One of the largest food retailers in the United States, Albertsons selected Per Angusta’s procurement performance management software.
FirstGroup uses Per Angusta to demonstrate Procurement’s value to all stakeholders
"I love Per Angusta’s flexibility and accuracy. It has helped to facilitate more robust conversations between procurement, finance and legal. The team has visibility of all procurement projects and contracts centrally, and by entity. They can report meaningful data to key stakeholders easily."
Key Facts
Leading private sector provider of public transport services
£4.3bn in annual revenue in the UK in 2020/21
Fleet of almost 9,000 buses and rail vehicles throughout the UK
Challenges
Gain a transparent view of procurement opportunities and activities
Provide reliable figures and visibility to Finance and other stakeholders on procurement performance to date
Benefits
Transparent sourcing pipeline with day-to-day performance visibility
Monthly procurement reports to monitor progress toward savings targets and forecasts
Proactive management and collaboration within internal stakeholders and between teams
Oversight and proactive monitoring of contract records and key metrics
Indisputable proof of added value provided by the procurement department
FirstGroup plc is a leading private sector provider of public transport services. With £4.3 billion in revenue and around 30,000 employees, its UK divisions transport nearly 700,000 passengers per day. First Bus is the second largest regional bus operator in the UK, serving two-thirds of the UK’s 15 largest conurbations with a fleet of around 5,000 buses. First Rail is the UK’s largest rail operator, with many years of experience running long-distance, commuter, regional and sleeper rail services.
Optimise visibility of day-to-day projects, savings and contract management
As Director of Procurement for FirstGroup, Nicola Molloy is responsible for coordinating the organisations diverse and disparate procurement functions across the Bus and Rail Divisions. With 30,000 employees spread across UK, managing an annual spend of over £3bn with 1,000’s of different suppliers can be demanding. Each bus or rail operator has its own set of sometimes rather distinct requirements which means that efficient allocation of procurement resources is critical. Nicola’s challenge is to serve the needs of all these business units in terms of cost, quality and delivery, while maximising the commercial value for the group overall.
Prior to introducing Per Angusta in 2016, FirstGroup had to manage disparate operations, tools, spreadsheets and practices while trying to find new ways to generate savings due to cost pressures elsewhere.
They were also motivated by figuring out how they could get people to work together to identify savings opportunities, track contract compliance and better measure Procurement Performance. For example, they wanted to know where they were using the same supplier and how they could get a better deal in these circumstances.
The team were using spreadsheets in different formats even though they had e-procurement systems in place. The gap was evident and the need to demonstrate procurement value to Finance and other stakeholders led the organisation to search for a better tool.
"When we were trying to track spend, measuring savings was very difficult. Historically, Finance didn’t view our numbers as reliable, particularly our savings projections for the next year."
Powerful Technology to demonstrate Procurement’s value and share a single version of the truth
By using Per Angusta, Nicola can get a real time view of project status in both the entities and the central team, along with a balanced view of strategic and tactical projects. The team has visibility of all procurement projects and contracts centrally, and by entity. They can report meaningful data to key stakeholders easily. One of the benefits of using Per Angusta has been improved collaboration with FirstGroup’s Legal team.
“It has helped to facilitate more robust conversations between procurement, finance and legal. We are now able to put procurement reports to the Executive Committee each month to show tracking against targets and forecasts. It has raised the profile of procurement in the organisation and has given our teams more visibility and credibility with management.”
says Nicola.
A flexible tool to get actionable insights & robust reports
Several dashboards have been developed by the FirstGroup team to report performance, including one specifically to capture internal Legal involvement in projects. Nicola and her team are continuing to look at how these dashboards can be improved to provide even better reporting. FirstGroup will also be an early adopter of Per Angusta’s allocations capability. This helps Per Angusta users to allocate the benefits from a single project to multiple stakeholders, removing the need for multiple project entries and simplifying the process. They are also considering how to use some of the many integrations that Per Angusta has with other Procurement technologies.
"The Per Angusta team has a background in procurement and speaks our language. They understand our real-life business challenges and have matched the system exactly to our operating environment."
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