Past struggles

In the 10 years prior to adopting OneAdvanced’s Purchasing Anchor Hanover’s procurement system was purely text-based with regards to viewing items. The ability to find items to purchase in an efficient manner was something they really used to struggle with. Their team couldn’t use key words to search for a whole list of chairs for example, you had to type in the specific name of each product you wanted, and there were no images to search either. One prime example of the search difficulties in the past were lightbulbs – on the system a text description of a lightbulb had; the code, the wattage, it’s fitting type and it had a long text string of
50-60 characters that meant more often than not you had to recall from memory the item that you needed - it was not very intuitive and very time consuming.

With Purchasing it is much simpler, if you search for ‘4W Bulb’ you can see exactly what it is you’re buying and this has made the procurement team’s role much easier.

Alex Holdsworth our Category Manager in Business Services, comments: “This ease of use was one of the primary factors we needed to consider when we made the decision to choose a new solution: Purchasing is, quite simply, the closest system out there to online shopping. The product was designed with the user (shopper) in mind, and so it mirrors online shopping when it comes to the user experience, like searching with generic keywords, having saved baskets and heading to the checkout as you would when doing any type of online shopping.”

Saving time

Having a nice-looking user interface and an easy-to-use system is useful, but what was of even greater importance to Anchor Hanover was the ability to cut down (or even remove completely) the time it would take to complete common tasks when compared to their old system.

With Anchor Hanover’s previous procurement system their team were having to spend many hours calling up suppliers to find out prices for products, ask for physical catalogues to browse through, or even seeking confirmation of order numbers for previously placed orders. They could be doing higher value tasks, but it was simply getting in the way.

Alex adds: “Once we implemented Purchasing into our organisation the manual tasks were significantly reduced. Purchasing and the way OneAdvanced manages the product information from suppliers means a much higher quality of data is available for the items in the system which ultimately leads to better order data. However, the time saved in the procurement process doesn’t simply come from higher quality data – there are numerous other aspects that help our users. Additional functionality like ‘saved baskets’ and ‘favourite items’ within the Purchasing enhances the efficiency and reduces the time required for end users to confidently buy what they need.”

Invoicing

One of the most valuable Purchasing modules Anchor Hanover implemented was invoicing model. With the invoicing module a high proportion of all the invoices from Purchasing are created within their Finance system. 

In the past the Anchor Hanover’s Purchase Ledger Team were taking 1-2 minutes to process every invoice they received. With invoicing module this processing time is down to less than 10 seconds per invoice, a reduction of over 90 per cent! Giving the team so much extra time for higher value tasks.

Not only that, but firefighting and error checking has significantly reduced too. Anchor Hanover no longer spend hours reviewing and amending invoices due to mistakes such as incorrect order numbers. With Purchasing the system matches the incoming invoice to Anchor Hanover’s system and rejects it back to the supplier if there is an error before it even gets to their Finance Team. It’s these types of job-easing factors which have saved Anchor Hanover’s team so much time.

Alex comments, “To put it simply: Not having to manually process an invoice is an absolute godsend without Purchasing we’d have to very rapidly recruit a lot more processing clerks to our Purchase Ledger Team to make up for the time that would be lost if we didn’t have the system!”

A trusted partner

The ease of using Purchasing is seen throughout the product, not just on the searching and purchasing side of things. Back in November 2018, when Anchor Trust and Hanover Housing Association merged to form Anchor Hanover Group, there were a number of considerations. One of these was integrating so many new members of staff under one company banner and unifying internal systems. However, with Purchasing this was a straightforward task. Anchor Hanover set up set up the new users on the system without needing support from OneAdvanced, and as the product is so intuitive to use, training for the software was able to be completed in-house by employees who had already been using the system over the previous years.

“If we did ever need support with anything, the team at OneAdvanced were always happy to help. Their support lines are open throughout the working day, the team are always available and our Account Manager at OneAdvanced is close at hand to make sure we have everything we need.”