This week we're looking at something we rarely talk about on the podcast - the public sector.
Insights on Source-to-Pay technology in the Public Sector
My guest this week is Grant Smith, COO of Elcom. He's here to lend his expertise, which is handy because the public sector is a topic I know relatively little about.

Grant hails from the UK, but his experience should be applicable to public procurement in any developed markets.

A brief overview of Elcom
We kick off with a brief history of Elcom.

It started out in the US in the early 90s as a hardware reseller. They developed a piece of software with MIT in Boston to run the ordering and procurement process for the business. When the dotcom bubble burst in the late nineties, they sold the hardware business and began to focus on the software side of things instead. 

In 2001 they were offered the Scottish government's P2P service, which they're still running. It's run as a shared service by the Scottish government, for and on behalf of the entire Scottish public sector, processing nearly 8 billion pounds worth of public sector spend each year.

Elcom also does work across the UK in the health and education space, where the software covers sourcing, contract management, P2P, inventory, point of care, analytics, and more, along with supplier services such as bid management.

It's a full stack suite, just in a very specific niche. And with such a saturated market, it's important to carve out that niche if you want to survive.

 
How is public procurement different from the private sector?
The main difference is that the public sector is quite heavily regulated. There are thresholds in terms of the value of goods, works, or services that you're buying that need to be advertised and go through a formal process.

For example, in sourcing, there are procedures that must be followed quite rigigly. In the private sector, you go out, you get your quotes and you make a decision on who you're awarding to.

But on the public side, there are a lot more rules to follow: Minimum number of bidders, the ratio between price and technical, and the documentation you need to go through, should the procurement be challenged. There are many more hoops to jump through on the public side, especially post award.

We then move on to discussing some tangible examples of what we can learn from public procurement, and focus first on healthcare.

 
What are the benefits of digitisation in public sector health care?
Grant's UK-centric experience means that he's used to working in health care as part of the public sector. This is of course not the case everywhere in the world, for example in the US. But he's seen interesting things in the UK's inventory and point of care space that are applicable worldwide.

In UK healthcare, there's a good initiative called 'scan for safety', whereby consumables are regularly barcode scanned to capture data and keep track of things during a procedure. The software captures information like stocktake data, items consumed during a procedure, who's in the room, and where a procedure takes place.

An innovation here is RFID (radio frequency identification) , which could really revolutionise the provision, costing and tracking of care in a clinical environment.