Procurement Systems Officer in Norwich

The council purchases all kinds of things from suppliers across the country: from social care to streetlighting, 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 practice 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.

What Will You Be Doing

• 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.

What We Are Looking For

• 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.

Who Are We

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 constantly improving by making the right information available. We prefer to sort out problems as helpfully and quickly as possible and then analysing the cause calmly when the problem has passed so we can minimise the same thing happening again.

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Generous holiday entitlement
• Health and Wellbeing services including fast-track physiotherapy and a free counselling service
• Flexible working opportunities including flexi-time, part time, remote and hybrid working – dependent on your job role and business need.
• Financial benefits such as: ‘Norfolk Rewards’ our employee discounts programme which helps you save money on almost anything, from everyday groceries and clothes, to holidays, new technology, gym membership, trips to the cinema and days out.
• A Blue Light card for Fire Service and Social Care Workers
• Relocation expenses (where applicable)
• An advance of your expenses if you travel for work
• Local Government Pension Scheme with generous employer contribution, life assurance, death in service payments and dependants’ pensions
• Tax efficient ways of getting extra pension and new bikes
• Access to our tax efficient car lease scheme for greener travel enabling you to lease a brand new, ultra-low emission vehicle (subject to eligibility)
• A payment if you refer someone you know to a hard to fill job

We want our people to be inspired and motivated to work well together, make the most of our workspaces, enjoy a healthy work-life balance, and deliver excellent services to Norfolk and its people. Flexibility is built into the way we work, with hybrid working a key feature for many roles. Our technology platform and equipment are first class, enabling you to connect and collaborate remotely. We ask that you have in place good Broadband connectivity.