Office Canopy Group helps consolidate procurement

The Office Canopy Group’s online procurement solution Fusion ensures that employees who order standard commodity items, such as IT, stationery and furniture, across a number of locations are doing so at the best available price and within budget.
The web-based procurement portal enables staff in large companies with a number of nationwide offices to order standard items for every location at the lowest possible price. This helps overcome problems such as inconsistent pricing when employees lack professional negotiating skills and also prevents unauthorised spend by staff.

The OCG Fusion solution gives staff the ability to turn on and turn off new sites, users and cost centres within the system themselves instantaneously; a process which can take weeks to implement with standard IT systems and suppliers.

The system is already being used by consultancy, engineering and project management services company AMEC to provide it with greater visibility, control and consistency of spending across its 100+ nationwide offices as well as all temporary building and project sites.

“Managing the supply needs of numerous temporary and permanent site offices across the UK is a huge undertaking, and not all of our sites had been comfortable or familiar with using the added benefits of advanced technology that online ordering provides” says Andrew Clifton, national contracts manager, AMEC.

“The OCG Fusion solution provides us with that management control at our fingertips. It was important to have this added value benefit available to enable our staff to log in to an AMEC branded website to place orders, and we can ensure that site spending is controlled via the ability to set protocols according to the authorisation level of each user.”

“We worked very closely with AMEC to ensure staff at key sites had a good understanding of the OCG technology and were confident that the system was designed to make their lives easier,” says Bill Stevenson at OCG.

“It can sometimes be difficult to encourage people to change the processes they are used to, but by sending the OCG team out to 30 AMEC offices across the UK to demonstrate the solution, we were able to ensure a fast and efficient roll out earlier this year.”