Industry news

The Crown Commercial Service (CCS), the successor to the Government Procurement Service (GPS), is beginning to take shape as the government release the details of four senior positions within the (CCS).

Advertisements placed for the roles of a Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Commercial Delivery Director, an IT Commercial Director, and a Telecommunications Commercial Director, have been revealed by the Cabinet Office, to be for the CCS.

Details of the positions reveal that the newly created CCS will focus on employing technology in order to deliver flexibility and increased efficiency within public sector procurement, while employing increased open-source services.

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Outsourcing services company Xchanging, has acquired e-sourcing provider MarketMaker4 (MM4), as the outsourcing company looks to expand into the e-sourcing market.

The deal, which is valued at $22 million, will see Xchanging expand its services to include online auction and negotiation services from MarketMaker4.

MM4 has an international client base across a range of sectors and has worked with Xchanging previously. The acquisition will see services from such past commercial arrangements expanded upon.

Ed Cross, executive director of Xchanging Procurement Services (XPS), described how the acquisition would provide: “significant opportunities for XPS to expand its service and product offering into a new market while expanding both MM4 and XPS’ customer base and market opportunity.”

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NextiraOne has been awarded a contract to provide infrastructure management services for Poundland.

A multi-year contract will see NextiraOne run the high-street chain’s network and data centre, alongside monitoring and optimisation services.

The employment of NextiraOne to manage Poundland‘s infrastructure is designed to increase stability, with the network specialists ensuring that the infrastructure remains operational during high stress periods during peak times.

Mike Gray, IT Director at Poundland, said: “By putting in place proactive and preventative service measures, we can minimise business impact and ensure a stable platform for our ongoing growth.”

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The public sector, including the Cabinet Office and the Treasury, has come under criticism from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), with a report saying that they “failed to achieve best value for taxpayers”.

The report identified key weaknesses in the current system, despite praise for the move to centralise procurement. The report identified that independence in departments for spending decisions meant that they were reluctant to give power to a centralised system, which in turn resulted in incomplete procurement data, hindering the Government Procurement Service.

The report also said that the government still had room to improve, when encouraging SMEs to bid for outsourced services, despite recent measures.

Margaret Hodge, PAC chairwoman, said: “The centre of government should be more forceful, rather than simply relying on encouragement and persuasion to get departments to alter their behaviour.

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U.S. bank JP Morgan Chase has increased its IT investment in analytics and data in order to improve compliance controls.

JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon, said that the bank had increased spending on technology by 27 per cent since 2011 to meet regulatory requirements, with around $1 billion spent in 2013 alone. JP Morgan has also increased its IT workforce by 4,000 staff since the start of 2012.

Investment had been focused on data analysis, control reporting and collecting relating to risk.

The move to develop IT to improve compliance comes after recent trading investigations, with the bank currently preparing to settle with the Federal Reserve and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for $800 million relating to a loss of $6.2 billion in 2012.

Mr Dimon said: “Never before have we focused so much time, effort, brainpower, technological power and money on a single, enterprise-wide objective”.

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U.S. based chemical manufacturer Ferro expects to save $100 million through the standardisation of procurement processes.

The chemical firm has selected Capgemini and Procurian to help transform indirect spend, with Capgemini providing back-office procurement standardisation, while Procurian will provide management services, including planning, compliance and contracting tools.

The standardisation of services is expected to create significant savings from Efficiency over time.

Peter Thomas said: “The benefits we expect to achieve in our indirect spend procurement function give us further confidence that our cost-saving initiatives will generate savings greater than $100 million”.

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New procurement rules have been announced by the Cabinet Office, with the aim of helping SMEs win increased business within the local public sector, as the government seeks to improve competition and savings through SME service tenders.

A consultation will be run until mid-October, regarding the proposed changes to increase the numbers of SMEs in public procurement, and reduce the dominance of large traditional firms.

Cabinet Office minster Chloë Smith, said: “With £230 billion per year spent on goods and services right across the whole public sector, government wants to seize the opportunity to help hard-working SMEs”.

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The NHS Shared Business Services has secured a single supplier framework for the NHS in England and Wales.

The five-year £4.6 million framework agreement has been awarded by the Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent Partnership NHS Trust and is aimed at saving NHS organisations time and money through efficiency savings.

The Trust estimates that the transfer of these three non-frontline services to NHS SBS will achieve savings of around £880,000 throughout the life of the contract.

John Neilson, Chief Executive of NHS SBS said: “Securing this agreement is a great achievement for NHS SBS. Importantly though, it offers a significant additional benefit to NHS providers both at the stage that they’re procuring shared services, and then through the sizeable efficiency savings we can achieve following the integration of our three core services.”

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MPs on the Government’s public account committee (PAC), have said that they expect costs for the abandoned NHS patient records system to rise above the current bill of £9.8 billion.

The project originally launched in 2002 was impacted by obstacles including supplier disagreements and technical challenges, resulted in missed deadlines as costs spiralled.

Committee member Richard Bacon described the program as: “one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos in the history of the public sector.”

Despite acknowledgement from within the public sector of, the need to improve procurement management, Mr Bacon added that “there is still a long way to go before government departments can honestly say that they have learned and properly applied the lessons from previous contracting failures."

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Accenture has acquired a majority stake in Vivere Brasil, as the outsourcing company looks increase services in Brazil’s rapidly expanding economy.

The purchase of Brazilian based Vivere Brasil, which provides mortgage processing services, will expand Accenture’s own mortgage service capabilities while increasing efficiencies and enhancing Accenture’s position in the country as the domestic mortgage market increasingly develops.

Mortgage loans in Brazil currently represent 7.4 percent GDP, with the mortgage market expected to grow to 10 percent of GDP by 2015, having experienced 41 percent compound annual growth since 2007.

Luis Simões, a managing director in Accenture’s financial services practice in Brazil, said: “As demand for home loans grows, Brazil’s banks will require ever-greater mortgage-processing capacity, efficiency and quality controls in order to compete”.

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