Friday 28 August 2009

Well the holidays are almost over for most of us and next week we return to something like normality in the council. I must admit that I have relished the last couple of weeks in terms on the amount of time that I've had to think about and plan the future direction of the Resources team. I find that quite difficult under normal circumstances with the pace of day-to-day work and the number of meetings that I have to attend.

So what about the future then? Well as the Leader has said it's all about delivery over the next four years. We've been on a journey to establish One Council, our community area boards and key enablers such as BMP. Now it's all about delivering the vision: resilient communities, customer focus, high quality low cost services and working together with our communities and partners (unitary plus).

So what does that mean for the resources team? In the short term, the next 4-6 months it means completing the appointments process, ironing out the residual issues with SAP and ICT generally, and commencing the pay harmonisation process. Over the next 12 months we will be leading major work programmes to meet key elements of the vision above. These include expanding our lean or systems thinking service transformation work (delivering customer focus and high quality low cost), work place transformation (delivering customer focus and low cost), procurement reform (delivering low cost), ICT investment (delivering customer focus, high quality and lower cost). More of this when we all meet on September 29 for the Resources team day, and more about work place transformation at the staff events starting in September - Salisbury is first up on September 7, so please come along if your are based in or around the city.

I chaired the corporate procurement board yesterday. This board of a cross functional team of directors and heads of service involved in procurement, commissioning and purchasing. It is charged with delivering procurement reform, encompassing; cost reduction - £9m targeted this year alone, development of our SAP procure-to-pay processes including category management, and developing our policies and procedures with regard to procurement generally. This group has a key role in the organisation as we spend over £325m per year on purchased goods and services. We were briefed by Tony Brett about the Buy Wiltshire website, www.buywiltshire.co.uk, an initiative aimed at businesses in Wiltshire to be able to advertise their services to us and each other and also for us to publish details of our current and potentially new contracts coming up. It is important to remind ourselves that when we purchase anything, we should be looking at buywiltshire.co.uk first to see which local suppliers can meet our needs. If you could all please do this.

Thanks for reading and talk again next week.

Carlton