Thanks to a new e-procurement system administered by NTUC First Campus (NFC), preschool operators in Singapore can achieve cost savings of seven per cent on average.
As staff will no longer need to go through the time-consuming process of sourcing, managing their own suppliers, and evaluating cost and quality, operators will see an increase in overall productivity.
This initiative is supported by the Education Services Union and NTUC’s e2i (Employment and Employability Institute) to operationalise the Early Childhood Education Industry Transformation Map, which identified raising productivity as one of the key strategies.
NFC Chief Financial Officer Hor Fong Lin said: “As one of the pioneer preschool operators in Singapore, we are committed to our role to uplift the preschool sector by pioneering industry best practices. This digital transformation initiative helps smaller preschool operators to achieve cost savings through volume aggregation and improvement in management controls and governance.
“More significantly, it frees up their manpower to focus on more critical operational responsibilities, such as delivering quality care and development of the children and partnering parents.”
Named EASI Procure, the system is a cloud-based e-procurement software platform that allows the operators to order commonly-used items for preschool operations from an NFC-curated catalogue of approved vendors selected and in use by NFC.
Since EASI Procure went live in June this year, 96 centres from 14 independent preschool operators have signed up to use the platform, of which 55 centres are expected to start using the platform in October 2018.
EASI Procure provides workflow-driven controls and downloadable analytics reports that help operators to better monitor their expenditures.
“It eliminates the need for price comparison between suppliers and speeds up decision-making processes for routine purchases. They will be able to leverage data analytics to track past purchasing trends and improve their budgeting processes,” explained e2i CEO Gilbert Tan.
As the platform is cloud-based, subscribers will benefit from upgrades that will be rolled out periodically. They include:
Chief Administration Officer John Ang from Alliance First Consortium, which adopted EASI Procure, shared: “One of the challenges we faced is that our centres are spread out island-wide and with our smaller order quantities, it was hard to achieve economies of scale. With EASI Procure, we can be guaranteed of fair prices from the suppliers.”
They will benefit from having a larger pool of operators that could potentially purchase their products and services. They are also assured of the operators’ financial position before extending credit terms to them, otherwise operators will have to pay cash on delivery for their purchases.
Operators can provide feedback through the platform as well as participate in the annual suppliers’ evaluation survey conducted by NFC. The suppliers will be evaluated on their timeliness of deliveries, quality of products and responsiveness to feedback and product replacements, among other considerations.
To assist and encourage the smaller preschool operators to adopt the EASI Procure platform, e2i will support their first year’s implementation cost under productivity grants such as the WorkPro Job Redesign grant to make jobs easier, safer and smarter for local older workers, subject to funding criteria and guidelines.
Interested operators can make enquiries at easiusers@ntucfirstcampus.com or 68481273.
