I am the first point of contact for Heads of Service/Chief Officers and their respective management teams in relation to advice, support and planning for all procurement related activity. My category area is ICT, Business Improvement, Finance & Audit. I have developed an understanding of this category and built trusting relationships with my clients. I am confident in identifying and implementing effective and efficient procurement solutions that ultimately lead to compliant, value for money contracts for Denbighshire and Flintshire County Councils.

This role saw the merge of the Flintshire & Denbighshire procurement teams to form the Collaborative Procurement Service. Within this role, I continued to build on my public sector procurement knowledge and was assigned to work alongside the Senior Procurement Officer responsible for Transport & waste. I assisted and sometimes led on the implementation of the first Dynamic Purchasing System for Flintshire County Council within the Transport Service which we later duplicated for Denbighshire County Council’s Transport team. This involved: Recommending and implementing changes with the way that the service procured their transport services. Training staff Sitting within the service to absorb the knowledge from the transport team to ensure I fully understood the operational side of the business to help and support them with their procurement requirements. I continued to manage the purchase to pay system configuration and once this moved over to the finance team I ensured that I trained and handed over the system to the best of my ability.

Within this role, in my opinion, I gained the confidence I needed to progress within the Procurement Sector. I built on my knowledge of public sector procurement and within this role I assisted and at times led on the implementation of the electronic purchase to pay system at Flintshire County Council. This included: System Configuration End User TrainingManaging changeManaging stakeholdersPresentations Spend Analysis Promoting No PO no Pay policyLiaising with senior managers on system set up and promoting efficient ways of purchasing. All of the above experience led to building my confidence in working with staff at all levels within the organisation. In addition, I completed my CIPs qualification and gained more experience in procurement for the public sector and led on multiple procurement project at both low and high values. With the confidence I gained from the implementation of the PROACTIS purchase to pay system this allowed me to more confidently recommend positive purchasing and more efficient and value for money framework agreements and contracts.