Municipality of Oss joins surrounding municipalities to use ISPnext for Procurement

Henny Geenen says: “Together, we are responsible for the central procurement of the municipality of Oss and for the relevant policy and advice. We also have seven operational buyers, each with a focus on a particular product category. We don't see it much in other municipalities yet, but it works very well for us. We have one buyer for ICT, one for facilities, two for public spaces, two for healthcare and one for real estate. We also have eight project managers who carry out public works tenders."

For 15 years, the municipality of Oss has cooperated with surrounding municipalities. Henny and Peter create a procurement plan and then try to cast a regional net. "Other municipalities also conduct tender procedures for us on a regular basis," Henny says. “The bottom line is that we receive maybe five tenders a year for the region, but get ten in return. It is a tremendously efficient way of working."

The municipality of Oss has worked with ISPnext for about five years now. "We had a long-standing relationship with the procurement consulting firm COPPA CBP," Peter Nederlof says. “Once every three years, we were granted a budget as a procurement department to have CBP conduct a procurement scan. After several years, CBP itself offered us an alternative solution so that we could perform this data analysis internally. That solution was ISPnext."

In the beginning, the municipality of Oss immediately made grateful use of the spend analysis in ISPnext. "Before we started using ISPnext, procurement was very scattered in the organisation. Each budget holder did their own tendering and it was by trial and error. We found that we had limited insight into the spend, who was spending what and which vendors the money was going to," Henny said. The Spend Analysis allowed Henny and Peter to independently perform analysis on the spend data that is loaded into ISPnext twice a year.

“Despite having a large spend of over 100 million euros per year, we can map and monitor our spend in detail. We have set up the system to have a single invoice from one supplier at one particular time. Thanks to ISPnext, we know fairly accurately what we spend, who spends it and what the money is spent on.”

After a year of using the spend module in ISPnext, the municipality of Oss also purchased the contracts module. Peter Nederlof says: "The main reason we started with Contract Management in ISPnext is simply because contracts were lost. As a result, contracts were unnecessarily extended or not extended when they should have been. To catch up, we put all contracts into ISPnext. That was a lot of work considering there were over 150 budget holders at the time who didn't realise there was another contract somewhere in the back of the filing cabinet."

For Peter and Henny, the data from ISPnext's Contract Management module now serves as input for the annual procurement plan. "We have insight into when contracts expire. We can send automated notifications to the appropriate budget holder and purchaser(s) and let them know they need to renew or cancel in due order.” Peter says that process is getting better and better. “The combination with Spend Management is also a huge plus. We know not only which budget holder is spending money, how much and to which supplier, but also whether there is a contract with the supplier.”

The municipality of Oss is a municipality in the province of Noord-Brabant. The largest part of the municipality is the city of Oss. In total, the municipality has 91,000 inhabitants divided into 25 affiliated built-up areas. The municipal organisation employs 700 people and has an annual procurement spend of over 100 million euros.