Joined up public sector procurement requires joined up spend data

In order to facilitate comparisons with other public sector organisations, benchmark your procurement performance and identify joint contracting opportunities, you need to have access to relevant data from other public sector organisations.

HM Treasury's recently published Operational Efficiency Programme (OEP) report highlights the need for consistent, comparable data, stating: "organisations need consistent, comparable data to be able to benchmark their performance against others to know whether the services they deliver constitute good value for money".

Supporting Collaboration and Comparison 

However, most financial systems will simply not contain that data. To overcome this obstacle we do two key things:

1. We aggregate all of the spend and related data for each public sector body we work for, irrespective of the original source, into a single, unified and consistent master database. In this way, meaningful comparisons with your peers are possible, as the process we use to standardise, classify & aggregate public sector spend data is identical, irrespective of the size, location or type of public sector body. We call the resulting unified database the Observatory National Dataset.
2. We invest considerable time and effort in the creation and management of master supplier records to which your own supplier records and the records of those also trading with that same supplier are linked. This makes it possible for you to quickly and easily identify opportunities for collaboration and joint contracting with more than 700 public sector bodies whose data has already been added to the Observatory National Dataset.