20 May 2002

IDeA:marketplace - the eGovernment solution for eProcurement

By John Thornton, Director of eGovernment, Improvement & Development Agency (IDeA)

IDeA:marketplace has been developed specifically for local authority use and is local government's own electronic procurement solution, built with world class partners and being made available in sufficient time for every local authority to be able to use it by the 2005 year deadline, at a pace to suit each local authority's particular requirements.

E-commerce is changing the way that all businesses across the world work.

How Local Authorities use it

The system is a fully hosted solution to which access is via the Internet. All that an authority officer therefore needs to access IDeA:marketplace is a user name, password and Internet access.

The rollout programme is designed to facilitate incremental deployment of IDeA:marketplace. It is therefore proposed that once an authority achieves a certain level of usage (measured by their collective volume of purchases from the IDeA:marketplace catalogue) then the appropriate interface with the participating authorities legacy finance system will be built. This involves an arrangement whereby each night a XML file of relevant data is transferred to the authority and in turn into their finance system. In this way, barriers to initial usage are minimised whilst ensuring that the authority may quickly move to a position where it takes maximum benefit afforded by an eProcurement solution such as IDeA:marketplace.

Public Impact

For the general public the benefits of IDeA:marketplace will come in the further elimination of those hidden costs that are a mystery to most of us and might help to answer the perennial question "where does all the money go"

The answer of course is in costs of communication, management, information management and the less obvious costs of contract administration.

The public will benefit

From the use that IdeA:marketplace is being put by the first council to use it, we have learnt that services such as the provision of meals on wheels become more efficient as specification mistakes are reduced, changes are implemented more quickly and the administration costs are slashed making the provision of the service more economic and effective. Costs will also be driven down through the provision of other social service provision such as residential and domiciliary care as buyers and suppliers learn to use the system more effectively to the ultimate benefit of the end user.

Education will benefit too as both teachers and pupils gain access to a wider choice of goods and services required to meet the demands of the modern curriculum. Specialist educational services and supply teacher agency arrangements will also be included helping to reduce the difficulty of getting the right replacement teacher at the right time.

In the near future even the repair of potholes in roads could be carried out more quickly and more efficiently as the road engineers are able to send their instructions to their contractors speedily and more accurately through the use of channels of communication such as wap phones against pre arranged contract conditions administered on marketplace and accessible through the same wap phone.

The business community too will benefit from IDeA:marketplace. Potential suppliers having easier access to information about council's requirements, forthcoming tenders and better access to the decision makers. The local government marketplace will become more accessible to all firms including SME's as the management and market information base builds and makes it easier too for firms that have until now had to deal with a large complex and unwieldy marketplace, enough to challenge even the most intrepid of salesman.

As with the councils the costs of transaction are substantially reduced for suppliers.

Putting it in context

Employing a tenth of the country's workforce local government is big business, every minute, council officers spend £200,000 - with a time equivalent to a further £20,000 a minute being spent on administration.

Across all of England & Wales this amounts to a staggering £25 billion per annum spent on bought in goods and services and perhaps more significantly over £2.5bn spent on the transaction of these purchases.

Many councils are buying substantially the same goods and services, so the opportunity for collaborative working is enormous. Last year every council submitted an Implementing eGovernment (IEG) statement in which authorities anticipated the need to invest £2.5bn to deliver their programmes.

For their eProcurement programme, IDeA:marketplace substantially reduces the cost to individual councils whilst providing a solution which has been specifically developed from within local government. Addressing issues such as sustainability criteria and engagement with Small and Medium Enterprises (SME's) are the more obvious examples, although many more become evident to users of the system.

In addition to the council's overall fiduciary duty there are specific best value performance indicators where IDeA:marketplace will make a significant contribution to the council's performance, inevitably assisting all participating councils with their Comprehensive Performance Assessment?

Few, if any fundamental best value reviews carried out in local authorities fail to be effected by procurement and in this respect IDeA:marketplace will form an invaluable tool not just through the reduced costs and released time but also in the wealth of management information available.

IDeA:Marketplace - our partner

EGS designs, develops and delivers solutions exclusively for the public sector. As the European sister company of NIC, EGS brings more than 10 years experience of implementing eGovernment with more than 300 federal, state and local agencies across the US, including eGovernment portals and eProcurement systems for 25 state governments and US Federal organisations that range from the National Institutes of Health to the US Navy.

Since 1991, NIC's eGovernment's technology has processed over 1bn hits, 52 million eGovernment transactions in 2001 alone, and powers America' s most successful government marketplace and AOL's GovernmentGuide. Government Computer News rated NIC's eprocurement platform the 'best online buying site for government officials', the Gartner Group rated the company 'the leading state portal firm', and both the Digital State Survey and a leading US university nominated NIC portals as the best in America.

In Europe, EGS is not only working with the IDeA to roll out IDeA:marketplace but is delivering a second nationwide PPP eMarketplace for the Association of Colleges to serve the £1.5bn further education market, and two separate large-scale, enterprise-wide eGovernment systems.

John Thornton joined the Improvement & Development Agency in September 2001 as Director of eGovernment. His role provides a focus for the co-ordination of eGovernment initiatives and to champion the interests of local government in discussions at national level with central government, suppliers and other public services.