Find out how Investigo public sector completed a major transformation of the Department for Education's frameworks and processes, saving the UK taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Client name
The Department for Education
The brief
The Department for Education was looking for ways to make long term cost savings across the UK school system. As part of this, it needed to evaluate the Schools Commercial Team’s spending and put a new process in place to identify savings opportunities, developing the team’s category management function. Needing a major transformation of their frameworks and processes, they brought in the Investigo Public Sector team to make it a reality.
Our solution
From July 2022 to Sept 2023, Investigo carried out a managed service project across the Department for Education. Monitoring our progress against monthly delivery milestones, we
worked collaboratively with DfE senior responsible owners (SROs) and internal stakeholders so we could quickly react to changing delivery requirements. We put together:
A full diagnostic of the Schools Commercial Team’s current category management strategy and processes.
A recommendations report identifying opportunities and challenges as part of a wider commercial transformation programme.
New commercial processes, including for collecting technology and utilities spending data for all schools across the UK.
To make this happen, we recruited and onboarded two category management specialists, a commercial transformation lead and a programme delivery manager, and upskilled four wider team members on the new category management methodology.
Success story
At the end of our managed service project, the Department for Education was equipped with:
A new communications pack for SRO sessions.
A category plan across FM, cleaning, utilities, catering and contingent labour.
Market analysis documentation.
Approved utilities and energy frameworks at category CAB.
A revenue cost recovery services market insight report.
A new category strategy for its technology, sourcing its cloud-based computing services through the G-Cloud 13 framework.
Two business cases demonstrating the benefits of the project based on data and risk reporting.
By working with the Insights team to carry out a technical analysis of spend and savings data, we helped the Department for Education cut their costs significantly, saving the UK taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds.
