Housing & Care 21 is one of the UK’s largest non-profit housing and care providers and is a national leader in providing quality, affordable housing for older people. Paul McGinnes recently took over as Head of Procurement. His first task was to understand the organisation’s current spend and plan for the future in terms of budgets and savings. The solution was to use Category Dojo, coincidentally becoming our first Category Dojo customer.

The procurement team used the tool to assess over 50 categories of spend, totalling well over 100m in annual spend value. Areas covered ranged from maintenance, repairs, refurbishment through to corporate requirements such as telecoms, office supplies and recruitment services. These were all assessed using high-level category data.

This exercise helped the team understand the basics of each category and consolidate all the information in one place. Further analysis of these categories using the bespoke algorithms in the tool provided deeper spend category insight, different strategy options and benefits assessment.

The final result allowed the team to put in place a plan setting out which categories to tackle first in order to make the best use of the available resources. It also created an overall budgetary plan, which supported the team’s efforts to meet the company’s Value for Money savings target, which was to reduce overall costs by 5% across the projects covered in the exercise. Senior managers supported the plan, which eventually led to the team exceeding that 5% target.

The eAuction platform provided in Sourcing Dojo has enabled us to drive further efficiency in our Procurement processes at a time when budgets are under tight constraints. The training and support they have provided has been invaluable and allowed us to run events in complex procurements. We look forward to working with them further on future events to continue to deliver increased efficiency.

“ Paul McGinnes, Head of Procurement & Facilities Management, Housing and Care 21