www.wrexham.gov.uk

United Kingdom

Industry: public sector

Annual turnover: £230 million

Personnel: 5,000

Background

CTM was chosen as the sole supplier of travel to Wrexham County Borough Council through an open OJEU procurement process. The requirements of the council were to control travel spend, streamline the procurement process and increase the utilisation of eProcurement p2p systems throughout the Council. 

The challenge

• Due to new Welsh procurement initiatives, the Council needed to consolidate as much of their procurement spend through eProcurement systems. Wrexham need to be able to create orders in a Procure-to-Pay (P2P) environment and ensure the entire purchasing process could be conducted digitally.
• In addition to this, orders needed to be 'held' for a period while approval was given and a purchase order (PO) raised. Each order needed to be matched completely with the value of each PO to allow the P2P process and electronic invoicing data to be reconcilable. 
• To streamline expenditure.
• To reduce cost.

The solution

Development work in partnership with CTM and the Council’s eMarketplace provider allowed both systems to communicate through cXML punch-out. This provided bookers at the Council with a seamless procurement process of travel, minimising the administration time required for bookings. Each order was held in the system until a PO was raised and then the tickets/reservations went live. This meant that each invoice was matched to an order value, providing continuity between the Council’s ERP, eMarketplace and CTM. 

Ongoing communication, and the creation of tailored literature explaining the booking process, assisted CTM in establishing 60+ regular bookers through the P2P system and our online booking tool.

Our account management team monitors preferred routes and suppliers online and offline and rates are reviewed daily, with our established relationships amongst the travel industry we were then able to negotiate rates to ensure costs were reduced. 

The results

• 95% of bookings through P2P.
• Removal of manual processing.
• Reduction of average ticket cost.