Public Buyers

Efficient Procurement with Mercell CTM

Interview with Ian Riley, Regulatory Procurement Manager at United Utilities.

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Introduction

United Utilities provides water and wastewater services to around seven million people in the North West of England supplying 3 million households and 200,000 business premises.

Ian Riley has been with United Utilities for 4+ years initially as a Category Manager before moving to his current role as Regulatory Procurement Manager. Prior to joining United Utilities, Ian spent 8+ years working as a Category Manager for the Crown Commercial Service in both the Energy and Property & Facilities Management sectors.

The Challenge United Utilities Faced Before Mercell CTM

The legacy procurement software had become unsuitable for us due to the various restrictions in the matter of functionality.

There were a number of weak points which resulted in our work to be cumbersome:

  • Small file size limit
  • No built-in messaging functionality
  • Inability to track responses
  • Lack of seamless publishing to Contracts Finder etc.
  • No possibility to lock down tender

Due to all the above we found CTM to be a more attractive solution compared to other systems.

Why United Utilities Chose Mercell CTM

We chose CTM as our eSourcing system because it proved to be the solution most aligned with public regulations we need to follow.

This is evident in the way the checklists are formatted, and how the process stages are defined. Moreover, in this way you can lock down the tender before opening as well as the messaging side. CTM complements the regulations and enables public procurement professionals to follow the regulations with ease.

How United Utilities Used Mercell CTM

The transition from the legacy system to CTM went smoothly thanks to the team at Mercell (at the time EU Supply). They guided us through the various system settings so that we could define our process templates without disruption to our day to day activities. We had our system up and running in just a couple of weeks.

CTM’s intuitiveness was definitely one of the reasons why we opted for the system in the first place. It is relatively easy to use even for people that are less experienced in procurement as they are guided by the checklists. The fact that users have less options in CTM than system administrators, indeed makes it easier for them to use it because they can only see what’s relevant to them.

I find the messaging functionality particularly useful as well as the audit trail which allows you to see who sent what message and when.

The ‘drag and drop’ feature enables you to upload multiple files and even folder structures which can be a life saver when you are working on a construction tender for instance. I could also call out the ‘smart add’ feature which we use to create questionnaires from documents.

I also like the ability to set up dummy suppliers to log in and to see exactly how the tender appears from the supplier side. During the tendering process this can be very useful to carry out some checks to make sure everything is set up properly and displayed as we want it to.

With CTM you get access to a test site as well which is very helpful to test configuration changes before the changes are made to the live environment.

“The primary reason I would recommend CTM is the balance between the functionality the system provides and how it is priced. CTM is a great value for money.”

The Results

With CTM we can quickly and easily publish tenders via the built-in integration to the publishing sites (Contracts Finder, Find a Tender Service and TED) and are no longer limited by file size (which is something you don’t see very often) when we need to upload large files to tender documentation.

With CTM we can quickly and easily publish tenders via the built-in integration to the publishing sites (Contracts Finder, Find a Tender Service and TED) and are no longer limited by file size (which is something you don’t see very often) when we need to upload large files to tender documentation.

With the CPV-codes built into the system our team members can save massive time they would otherwise have to spend on looking up those codes in a search engine.

It’s common knowledge that the Social Value aspect is becoming increasingly important in public procurement. The social value added by CTM:

  • It is straight forward to use
  • It empowers small to medium enterprises to run competitions without a large procurement team

CTM is easy to use and saves valuable time & resources.