Date published: 01.09.08 - not release date

Seven Higher Education Institutions Sign Up To EGS’ Parabilis ecommerce Exchange for e-Procurement

University of Hertfordshire , St Andrews University , Institute of Cancer Research Now Live

Higher Education Sector Spend Exceeds £3 Billion Annually

EGS Ltd, the UK’s largest and fastest growing ecommerce Exchange for the public sector and its suppliers, today announced that seven universities have signed up for its Parabilis electronic trading environment for the Higher Education sector.

Three institutions, University of Hertfordshire, St Andrews University and Institute of Cancer Research are now live and trading with a further four to go live in the coming months. In 2005, the Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium (SUPC) recognised the need for a marketplace solution to support collaborative procurement and deliver substantial process efficiencies across the sector. EGS was awarded the contract to provide the technology base as well as to develop and manage Parabilis. The SUPC is playing a leading role in driving collaboration and efficiency gains around e-Procurement spending in the Higher Education sector.

The SUPC was formed in 1974 with the objective of pooling of all available information on prices and discounts, negotiating special discounts on a group basis wherever practicable and ensuring co-ordination of supplies, and devising arrangements to secure to member universities the advantages of group purchasing. Today, the SUPC has 49 Higher Education members and 39 Further Education members. The University of Hertfordshire , St Andrews University and the Institute of Cancer Research are all now live and trading through EGS’ Parabilis Exchange. Southampton University , University of East Anglia , Salford University , and Exeter University are expected to follow in the coming months.

“We initially contracted with EGS to develop the Parabilis Exchange in December 2006,” said Susan Wright, Regional Purchasing Co-ordinator for the SUPC. “We wanted to increase the usage and accessibility of collaborative contracts, reduce contract leakage, streamline procurement processes,, increase our purchasing leverage, and gain a better understanding of consortium expenditure. Each individual institution is at different stages of electronic trading. Some have good purchasing management systems in place whereas others are at a less advanced stage.”

The SUPC’s goal is to have 30 institutions signed up to the Parabilis Exchange by 2012. A number of universities are currently running pilots in Parabilis and will be going live later this year.

“The Consortium’s members have a combined non-paid spend that exceeds £1 billion per year, and the Higher Education Sector spend exceeds £3 billion per annum. The potential for what we can do through Parabilis is huge,” added Wright. “The savings financial savings and operational benefits are tremendous. For example, we can save £44 per order through automated online purchasing to payment processes. One of the reasons we selected EGS was that they offered a full purchase-to-payment solution with e-invoicing and hosted catalogs. We looked at whole life costing, service levels, knowledge of our sector, implementation and ongoing support, as well as the overall sustainability of the company. We didn’t want to place a huge financial burden on suppliers – it had to be free for smaller suppliers, which is something EGS accommodates very well.”

The SUPC expects to see a marked increase in time savings, aggregated buying, reduction of maverick buying and reduced costs. The system will be integrated with a wide range of various back end and financial systems throughout the various participating member institutions in order to avoid double keying and facilitate transfer of data.

Designed and managed by EGS specifically for higher education sector, the Parabilis Exchange is driven by the University Consortia in conjunction with EGS. The contract was awarded by SUPC and Parabilis has been endorsed by ENPC (English National Purchasing Consortium). Parabilis is a hosted solution able to work in tandem with current purchasing systems or as a stand alone solution, providing a singular interface between institutions and their substantial supplier base.

Buyers in the UK public sector raise over 50 million purchase orders per year and suppliers post over 100 million invoices per year. Shared Service ecommerce environments help dramatically reduce the costs of these processes and underpin collaboration between groups of public sector bodies to get the best from national, regional and local collaboration. There's £100 billion of e-procureable spend in the public sector every year. The combined efficiencies of business process cost savings and e-Procurement cost savings delivered by EGS have the potential to save the public purse well over £1 billion per annum. The solutions also offer major cost savings for suppliers. With almost one million online catalogue items (the largest available), EGS Exchanges also have the potential to reduce the unit price of goods and services by as much as 30 per cent.

About EGS Ltd

Founded in 2000, EGS Ltd is the UK ’s leading supplier of ecommerce Exchanges for the public sector. The company’s Shared Service ecommerce solutions are used by over 150 public sector buying organisations. EGS operates a series of inter-locking regional and sector focused ecommerce exchanges, providing services designed to automate and reduce the costs and timescales associated with the procurement to pay lifecycle. The services save considerable time and cost for both buying organisations and suppliers alike. EGS is the biggest and fastest growing ecommerce Exchange for the UK public sector with more than 50% market share, making it the market leader in its field, and the most successful Exchange of its kind in Europe . With the largest Shared Services customer base, EGS has 150 public buying organisations linking with 30,000 of their chosen supplies and the main contracts from Public Purchasing Consortia. Electronic purchasing is taking off. EGS has seen a 500% growth in the use of its services in past two years alone, and expects the trend to continue.

For further info, contact:

Monique Chambers
Devonshire Marketing
+44 (0) 207 871 2781
monique@devonshiremarketing.com