AHDB Case Study
The Challenge
Established in 2008 the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) purpose is to inspire farmers, growers and industry to succeed in a rapidly changing world. They equip the industry with easy to use, practical know-how, which they can apply straight away to make better decisions and improve their performance. AHDB is a statutory levy board and is funded by farmers, growers and others in the supply chain. Themes include building sustainable plant and animal health and facilitating wholesome and trusted food in the supply chain.
AHDB were running a manual processes for interactions with their stakeholders and suppliers. This process was very labour intensive, inefficient and prone to errors.
Currently for all these communications they are using emails: contacting suppliers by email, receiving quotes by email and communicating requirements internally within AHDB via email. Tracing orders, requirements, quotes and other communications was a manual process of searching through these emails to find the relevant communication.
Communication with suppliers were getting unmanageably complex, across branches and departments covering the 400 staff organisation.
The Solution
The cloud based Enterprise solution focused on addressing the collaboration with and communication between the purchasing service desk, the suppliers and the internal customers. Automating quotation requests from internal users; quotes from the supplier base; and the handling of the resulting orders.
The solution also addressed the automation of internal customer orders to these suppliers, through the service desk. Reducing the errors associated with generating these orders and ensuring that they match to the appropriate quotations.
Plus, critically it provides an audit trail for all requests, quotations and orders.
AHDB's service desk approach ensures control of access to the suppliers and ensures that latest pricing is obtained via quotations. The flexibility of the processes, that the Claritum system delivered, allowed AHDB to achieve a managed collaboration between suppliers and the ultimate end user.
The Result
AHDB achieved significant gains in efficiency for all parties involved: AHDB users, procurement service desk and suppliers. With fewer errors being made. The new automated process transformed their procurement process. Removing manual email process steps and automating interactions.
They are able to provide feedback to their suppliers, based on the audit trail of activity associated with each supplier and the accumulated data over time. Plus the new process addresses issues of compliancy and provides clear reporting that includes the savings achieved.
It will also ensure that there is no direct engagement with
suppliers, without the service desk being involved. Quotations will be
automated and accessible only to the purchasing desk.
AHDB uses Claritum more broadly in terms of a completely automated processes. Adding the functional blocks from the Claritum library to support additional processes, such as invoicing and stock management.
Benefits
Sourcing
The Claritum platform manages the supplier relationship and the process of collaboration around quotations
Purchasing Service Desk
AHDB, using the Claritum Cloud Platform, provides an internal purchasing service desk to all employees needing to purchase print related materials
Audit Trail
The Claritum platform tracks every transaction and provides a much needed audit trail for interactions with internal stakeholders and suppliers
8
Years using Claritum
2
Service desk professionals
400
number of staff