In an interview with Radio 4’s Today programme last week Sir Phillip Green, billionaire owner of the Arcadia Group, told how he felt procurement offered a real “opportunity” to save money for the government in its bid to reduce costs, describing how he and his world-class team would be scrutinising government spend as part of the external efficiency review that David Cameron has asked him to conduct.   

With short timescales and deadlines Sir Phillip’s first goal is to identify where funds have been spent. “We need to obviously accumulate a large amount of information across some key areas of spend.....It’s all a question of what availability of information there is, how good the information is, that we’re able to respond”. He added “I think what we need to do is, we need to get ourselves focused on the big spends in which departments, where is the money actually being spent?”  The question now is – will Sir Phillip and his team gain clear visibility of government spending in order to truly analyse where efficiencies can be made?  

In our recent ‘doing battle with the deficit’ survey into the opinions and attitudes of public sector procurement professionals we discovered that 82% of survey respondents believed that savings are most likely to come from spending efficiency, but only 6% believed their spend management processes were ‘highly efficient’.  Over 25% of procurement professionals in the public sector questioned did not know what proportion of their organisations overall spend was ‘maverick’ or off-contract’ and an indication of the wide and varied manual, part-manual and fully automated spend management processes could also be adding to the lack of visibility and accurate reporting.  

Process automation and purchase-to-pay solutions provide clear and accurate visibility – the first step towards analysing spend and identifying where savings can be made. Without solutions such as these in place across all areas of the public sector, will Sir Philip meet his challenge?