Procurement Systems Officer

Overview

Procurement Systems Officer | 9764 | Permanent Contract | 37 hours per week | £31,537 to £33,699 per annum (Scale G) | County Hall, Norwich / Hybrid

The council purchases all kinds of things from suppliers across the country: from social care to street lighting, from fire engines to library books. Whilst you will not be doing any procurement yourself, you will be advising departments across the Council on best practise and compliance to ensure their procurements are correct.

This post will oversee purchase ordering in our main purchasing system, both ensuring day to day purchasing operations run smoothly and also developing improvements and efficiencies through process improvement and automation. Your role in the team will be to manage the first port of call for purchasers who have queries – you will line manage the three people who work on the helpdesk resolving queries, develop and provide training to people using our purchasing system, keep an eye on our intranet content and make sure it is kept up to date, and coordinate work to make improvements by suggesting opportunities for improvements and efficiencies and then coordinating the work to implement those opportunities.

Although we don’t directly interact with suppliers, we sort out the messy details and small print, resolving problems and making sure things run smoothly.

Administration skills and attention to detail are important, but it’s your ability to understand the reasons behind processes and apply that reasoning to different scenarios that will really make you successful in this role. You will also need to be a great communicator with strong IT skills. Experience of reviewing processes to make them more efficient would also be really useful.

• Leading the procurement helpdesk – maintaining a reputation of strong customer service ethos, ensuring the right information is available to the organisation through all relevant channels including FAQs on our intranet as well as effective training.
• Solving problems confidently, using your initiative to make sure things happen smoothly.
• Coming up with ways to improve established processes to make them more efficient, and then leading on the work to implement the changes.
• Analysing data on purchase orders so the team can make sure the organisation is compliant with our own policies.
• Maintaining contract and supplier records on the electronic system, responding swiftly when things change.

• IT skills – good at using spreadsheets – daily use of Microsoft Office software, particularly Excel and Outlook.
• A strong customer service ethos – someone who wants to help people to get it right first time, who will take the time to help people where needed, and who will work with people to improve when things go wrong.
• Confident IT user who can quickly learn new computer systems and get the most out of them – can understand how the system works and use that knowledge to suggest technology solutions where we need to improve processes and work with IT colleagues to make it happen.
• A proven record of problem solving, with confidence to take the initiative and get things sorted.
• Excellent communication skills, both in writing and verbal.
• Someone who prides themselves on attention to detail.
• A good team player who enjoys helping colleagues and is willing to pitch in when required.
• Understanding of purchase ordering and/or broader procurement principles would be helpful but is not necessary as full training will be available.

• The procurement team is a great place to work. We have a few Procurement sub-teams and this role will work fairly closely with them.
• We focus on making sure the organisation can easily make purchases in the right way – setting up training, systems, information sources to help people get it right.
• We are keen on using evidence to inform our decisions and often develop new reports to show particular trends in the data – for example showing where a process change might have the biggest impact/benefit to the organisation.
• We talk to purchasers across the organisation on a daily basis, and work with them to make sure their part of the process is…