on pan-London procurements with other London Boroughs and the Clinical Care Groups. Category Managers support customers in City Management and Communities, Planning, Public Health, Corporate Services, Housing Regeneration, General Construction and Property. To enhance the value that our team creates Category Managers will often co-locate to work in the same areas as the services that they are supporting. Procurement Services, working in collaboration with the Council’s key Services, are driving innovation within their procurements. For example, rather than adopting the traditional parking enforcement approach, the council has adopted the use of marshals, who ensure that drivers park safely can find a street where parking spaces are available and pay the appropriate fee. To support this further, the council has invested in parking sensor technology as part of its procurement strategy, enabling staff to view parking spaces and direct drivers to a street with ample space. Members of the public are also
10
able to download an app created by the council in order to find a suitable space. However, Oliver explains, “This is all about trying to help people through our parking solutions – however, we do still issue parking tickets and we have a back-office service that is outsourced to NSL that delivers a very efficient service in terms of process and transactions.” To ensure the delivery of key services, the council currently outsources a number of contracts, such as Agilisys for distributed computing and service desk. BT currently holds the council’s managed services contract, in addition to back office finance services (processing of invoices), alongside its data centres and essential HR services, as part of several frameworks. “Outsourcing our back-office functions is providing great efficiency to the council, but also, importantly, these procurements are helping to deliver against our medium-term plan to bridge the funding gap that all local authorities are facing in these times of reduced funding from central government.”