The Collaborative Law Enforcement Procurement (CLEP) is a Home Office program that joins together local forces across the country. Discover how we used strategic procurement techniques to help support their needs.
Challenge
Proxima was selected through an open competitive tender process to provide Strategic Procurement Consultancy and Savings Implementation across all 43 UK Police Forces. CLEP aimed to achieve savings of approximately £200m on the £1.7bn spent by all UK Police Forces on third-party goods and services. Previous efforts had failed due in a part to the sheer volume of data and the challenge of coordinating resources across regions.
The programme comprised of 3 phases;
- Strategic procurement advice and opportunity assessment
- Sourcing and category strategy creation
- Implementation/ delivery pilot
The primary objective was to understand how and where forces could collaborate on procurement to achieve challenges and savings targets without compromising the quality of service or citizen safety and then commence benefit delivery.
Approach
Proxima deployed a flexible delivery team which would ensure that CLEP could benefit from having a core programme team but also draw down upon key specialisms and category knowledge as and when required. The first of these specialisms was a data team to process and categorise over 3 million AP line items creating a granular analytics cube as the basis for the assessment.
Further, we deployed category experts aligned to the key expenditure areas to work closely with CLEP stakeholders to profile markets, assess opportunities and develop collaborative category plans; a 3 three roadmap focusing on sourcing plans, governance, policy, strategy, and supplier relationship management.
Results
The partnership was highly innovative and represented a new approach for the police. Proxima and the CLEP management team worked closely together in a collaborative governance model to ensure that the program had momentum and was able to flex with changing demands and funding rounds.
- Stage 1 – Project Brief: The process identified which categories should be included or de-scoped (due to the availability of spend data, maturity of the market, and recent sourcing activity). In all, 42 briefs were created, identifying between £102m and £135m in annualized savings.
- Stage 2 – Strategic Procurement: 12 detailed category strategies were produced, with an upward revision to the savings estimate, showing the potential for £121m£156m in annualized savings, representing around 12% of addressable spend. In addition, two buying guides were produced which provided pragmatic advice on how the Forces should implement projects.
- Stage 3 – Savings implementation pilot: From month one, “quick win” initiatives were identified and implemented. These included fuel cards, contingent labor, and legal audit projects. This pilot work saved over £2.5m, proving the concept that savings can be made and a significant return on investment provided.
Proxima provided specialist procurement consultancy to assess the opportunities for savings from £1.7bn+ of spend across all UK Police Forces and how to unlock these. This was a monumental task which had been attempted before but never done successfully; one Proxima managed to do in a complex environment through professionalism, dedication and resource flexibility
CLEP Chairperson
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