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Pagabo Live – Digitising Public Sector Contract Management

29 October 2024
4 minutes read

Despite a turbulent four years since its publication, the Construction Playbook set a clear direction of travel by earmarking an expectation to improve digitisation across the industry.

However, that push for digitisation is not only found in how we construct and build. It’s founded in ‘doing things better’ throughout every part of the journey. For the public sector, this level of increased efficiency and better approach to data is very important for its progress and overall future – but with challenges boiling down to not enough money or manpower, the question remains how to deliver these efficiencies.

Our Head of Partnerships and Integrations, Charley Wainwright, was on the panel of latest Pagabo Live session taking a deeper dive into this topic. He joined Karen Carter, head of national delivery at Pagabo, and Jacqueline Byrne, director at water and legionella specialists HBE, to explore how technology can plug the gap and allow people to do more with its assistance.

 

Why is contract management so important for the public sector?

The contract is a vital part of any project, and it needs to be done correctly to protect all parties and keep the project running smoothly to time and budget – and digitisation is the solution to the complicated and time-consuming nature of contract management.

It’s also important to remember that the risk doesn’t start at a particular project value, and by no means does a bigger project value mean more risk. In fact, it’s those smaller schemes that can have a greater scale of risk because if something goes wrong, the implications compared to the overall programme cost are much higher, meaning it could double or triple costs for example.

Budgets are tight and nowhere more so than in the public sector. That’s when organisations may opt to carry out their contract management more manually – often in Excel. The potential pitfalls and risks here are clear, and when considering one of the biggest reasons for disputes is around poor contract administration there is the question of whether you can afford not to invest in tools to minimise this risk. Having Sypro to standardise processes, streamline activity and communication, and flag potential problems ahead of time inherently protects any investment from the public sector.

 

Driving public sector digitisation

We’ve worked with nearly 100 local authorities, and nearly 200 NHS trusts – affording every single one the ability to manage projects with complete supply chain compliance.

Public sector spending is always highly scrutinised, so using Sypro means no money is left on the table and every penny is not only used compliantly and with the most value in mind, but the overall investment is also protected. A centralised system housing all contract information, progress, communication and clarity of actions and responsibilities also creates a stream of information carried throughout a project that provides and proves compliance – and helps with continuous learnings and creating the all-important ‘golden thread’ of information recorded quickly and accurately.

Sypro’s open API and integrations with other tools including Power BI allows enhanced levels of reporting too, allowing users to report across multiple projects in their portfolio. In turn that’s a greater level of performance and learnings to take forward into future projects, feeding a continuous improvement process.

Most importantly, our customers report real efficiency improvements, including up to 35% reduction in admin time – and for those managing hundreds of compensation events via Excel, this is no surprise.

 

The power of data-informed decisions

Better collection and administration of data is needed across the industry – and it’s this high-grade analysis informing better decision making that will really move the needle.

There was clear agreement across the whole panel for Pagabo Live that the industry needs to get better with data, especially when it comes to collection, administration and analysis to take learnings forward. It’s this high-grade analysis that holds the power to change how we approach projects and take the knowledge to improve in the future.

There is a sense of realism around risks in industries like construction, and so the approach here relies on incremental changes. No organisation will make huge, untested changes to the way projects are delivered due to the scale of risk that brings – and with more high-profile industry casualties like ISG, this naturally increases the risk aversion for other organisations across the sector.

This being said, there is a lot to gain with those incremental changes and technology like our own is really pushing the envelope in getting the maximum benefit out of a smaller change. Learnings can be taken forward with better approaches to data – and if we all pull together the construction industry can move the needle and go from surviving to thriving.


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