The Challenge

Walsall Council wanted to improve its overall visibility of the Council’s spending, including any non-contract spend. In addition, they wanted access to readily available and accurate information to support collaboration with other public bodies, without the need to dedicate the team’s valuable time to research information across a variety of sources.

The Solution

Walsall Council chose Oxygen Insights to provide a comprehensive view of spend data. Oxygen Insights takes open data from transparency of invoiced spend, decision-making and contracts and turns it into meaningful intelligence. Insights includes detailed information on suppliers and contracts so the Council can better understand their position in the market and identify any risks.

Walsall Council also make use of Insights Carbon, a tool that helps local authorities understand their Scope 3 Carbon emissions by category and supplier, enabling the Council to focus their efforts where it will have greatest impact.

What The Client Says:

“Insights gives us visibility of what other councils are doing and has improved collaboration. We find the spend data really useful, in terms of what Walsall Council is spending overall, to gain greater understanding of our suppliers and the market, and to identify opportunities to work with other councils when procuring similar goods and services.

“Having Insights saves the team valuable time which would otherwise be spent retrieving and reviewing data. Although this information can be found elsewhere, it takes a lot of manual effort to find and maintain the data. With Insights we can find out all we need at the click of a button and know that it is regularly updated.

“Insights Carbon is a really useful addition. It’s easy to use and gives great insight to where intervention is necessary – and it’s not in the expected places.

“Overall, we’ve used Insights for over 5 years now – it gives us visibility that we couldn’t do without.”

David Sheldon, Procurement Business Manager, Walsall Council