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Woodway Park Success Points Way to £70m Savings in the Education Sector

Delivering the very best IT into the classroom in the shortest possible time and for the best price, every time has shot to the top of the agenda in education establishments. No longer does the debate focus solely on the importance of getting ‘computers for schools’, it is about getting the highest spec IT possible for the best price, quickly.

This focus must also consider numerous dynamics without compromising the balancing act of providing quality education vs maximising budgets.

Coventry Council’s Woodway Park School is one pro-active organisation that is seeing the benefits of a best practice procurement tool - theitindex.co.uk/gov - delivering best value IT purchase after purchase. This has helped the school set the standard for education procurement efficiency savings at 10% on IT budgets and four working days a month in time.

The school has been able to buy more for the same budget and smash the DFES PC:pupil ratio of 2:1, so delivering better, faster technology education to its pupils.

Kristian Smith, Strategic Procurement Officer at Coventry Council, said: “The solution matches the needs of the challenging education environment. It has improved the financial, labour and management efficiency of the school’s ICT expenditure.”

theitindex.co.uk/gov is a web based IT procurement tool that daily updates a list of more than 100,000 products from more than 1200 different vendors by best price and availability. Operating in a secure on-line environment, the solution saves time and money, adding value to the bottom line so organisations can stretch the reach of their IT budgets.

And after saving over 35% on one high configuration, high volume five figure order, Woodway Park School is being hailed as the savings benchmark that other schools and the broader education sector should aim for.

The school previously used its outsourced IT support manager to procure IT, which meant it had little control over getting the best deal or delivery.

As a result, Woodway Park acknowledged the highly dynamic nature of the IT marketplace - daily price, availability and spec changes - and that an in-house best practice approach had to be found that consistently delivered best value IT.

After implementing theitindex.co.uk/gov, Resources Manager Deborah Brown said: “It is saving us in excess of an hour per order, which would otherwise be spent liasing with suppliers. This equates to four working days a month that are better spent on other key tasks.

An example. Much of our system is Dell based, but the solution demonstrated to us that HP provided a better cost, availability and specification match. We were then able to discuss the finer details of this order with our account manager at Probrand. We saved over 35% on this order alone. Result!

Deborah Brown
Resources Manager

“We have been so impressed with the overall solution to our IT procurement headaches that we have started to convert all our printers to HP as well.”

Uniquely, the solution acts as a ‘one stop shop’, bringing the key vendors in the industry together in one desktop application. As a result Woodway Park has enjoyed a combination of cutting edge e-procurement technology and personalised customer relationship management.

Having already demonstrated the solution’s power in a number of exemplary schools such as Bradford Grammar and Haberdasher’s Askes’ Boys School, theitindex.co.uk/gov is proving to help public sector organisations return a minimum of 10% on their IT budgets.

Woodway Park Headmaster, Steve Allen, adds: “This truly is a best practice purchasing tool that has demonstrated that great deals do exist outside of Dell.

“Based on the benefits we have enjoyed in such a short space of time, the solution has the potential to save the education sector around £70M on its annual IT spend [c.£700M].”

This is equivalent to 280,000 PCs that could be used to improve the UK’s PC:pupil ratio. Alternatively, such savings could be used to train teachers on tomorrow’s technology to further speed up its implementation, so improving technology education in schools.

Following the initiative’s success, Allen continues: “We are keen to share our experiences with other leading schools.”

“Put simply, it is helping us provide our pupils with a better education.”