Government Technology

Claritum

Driving value for money and efficiencies from your print spend

The Comprehensive Spending Review is putting pressure on the public sector to improve standards and drive value for money procurement. As a result, local authorities are adopting print spend management solutions such as Claritum

By deploying Claritum's print spend management software, significant, sustainable and measurable value for money can be achieved from a combination of price reductions, process improvements and minimised wastage without the need for costly and disruptive outsourcing.

Claritum streamlines the procurement, management and payment of a wide range of printed materials. Whether dealing with a framework of approved printers or your own in-house capability, Claritum reduces the administration of pricing, through to invoice. Authorised users have access to comprehensive real time management information for monitoring both purchasing performance and service level agreements.

Organisations benefit from a collaborative approach to supplier management by aggregating spend across organisations to drive savings. Claritum acts as a common system across multiple departments, for recording what has been purchased, at what price, and from whom, as well as ranking and rating the performance of suppliers.

The tried and tested Claritum platform integrates with most leading procurement and finance platforms and has been engineered for large-scale use.

Claritum is a proven solution, helping many leading Councils, including the London Borough of Enfield, Ealing Council and Greenwich Council, transform their print and document capabilities into highly efficient, dynamic profit centres.

Key benefits:

Maintain direct relationship with your suppliers (eliminate multiple mark ups).
Streamline complex / ad-hoc requirements, automate standard or repeat jobs.
Control approvals, track budgets, monitor costs, reconcile invoices and manage recharges.
Software-as-a-Service (browser based) so no additional hardware or software required.
Organisation wide spend visibility and transparent procurement process.
Purchasing leverage through contract compliance.
Lower supplier costs / collaborative process optimization.
Typically 40-80% administration reduction.
Reduces errors, obsolescence, wastage & rush charges.
Improved brand compliance.
Delivers real time Management Information.
Allows competitive, efficient, fair and open tendering process.

Case study
The London Borough of Enfield save 17-20% on their print spend through implementing Claritum.

As a consequence of the comprehensive spending review, The London Borough of Enfield had already implemented an e-procurement solution, however it become apparent that print was a complex spend category to manage as every job is unique, specifications vary, prices change and supplier performance is variable.

Enfield’s in-house printing facility had dated and inefficient machinery. Manual processes resulted in low utilisation. Enfield decided to proactively transform the print unit into a dynamic profit centre by separating print services and focusing on copying, scanning, 1 and 2 colour print and digital while outsourcing litho to approved printers.
To facilitate this change meant Enfield had to implement a sophisticated print procurement solution, to aid the procuring, managing and paying for print. After extensive research they implemented Claritum.

The time taken to specify and gain prices either via contract prices or RFQ from the approved roster have been significantly reduced, and the print team has total transparency of the prices quoted. The prices submitted by suppliers in the tender are the maximum the Council will pay. Mitchell Tait, Print services Manager at Enfield explains “One client asked for a quote at nine o’clock on a Monday morning, the quote was back within minutes, the order was placed in the next few minutes and the job was delivered the same day”

Enfield are seeing the benefits of increased efficiencies and savings. Tait goes on to explain “We spend externally about £300,000 - £400,000 on print, I’ve done a cost analysis on one department and we saved about 17-20%”

Customers can directly order a range of documents; print and variable data via a customer facing portal which sits on the council’s intranet, with order processing fully automated through to invoicing and file submission. The Self-Service platform allows multiple users to order pre-authorised personalised print (e.g. business cards, stationary, and documents,) or stock items within pre-configured spend controls & payment processes.

Orders are routed directly to pre-approved production with auto-generated purchase orders and press ready artwork, or if the order is a stock item, a pick list is auto-generated for the warehouse.
Print specifications, contract prices, spend controls, personalised artwork templates will be pre-specified centrally and account specific payment options will be provided.

Orders placed will appear as ordered jobs on the procure-to-pay platform for processing. End-to-end automation can be achieved through auto-issuing of purchase orders combined with press ready artwork directly into supplier hot-folders.

After the success of Enfield, Claritum has won more Local Government clients and is assessing the potential of shared services to further drive value for money in the sector.

For more information
Contact us to see how Claritum can benefit your organisation.
Tel: 01225 851666
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web: www.claritum.com