GUIDANCE
KNOWLEDGE
TRANSFORMATION
DEFRA BENCHMARKING
GKT were commissioned by the Shared Services directorate of DEFRA (Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs) to undertake a Benchmarking exercise covering the range of corporate/back office services provided by the SSD:
-
Procurement
-
HR
-
Payroll
-
Finance (from Procurement to Pay)
The following support capability is provided:
-
Oracle System Development and Support
-
Oracle Customer Training
-
Enquiry Centre
-
Customer Account and Contract management
-
Project Management
As well as providing a comparison of costs against a range of service metrics, our analysis provided a comparative breakdown of service costs by cost type (direct pay, non-pay and overhead costs).
We were also asked to provide an impact analysis, looking at different activity scenarios to see how these would impact upon the cost comparisons and particularly the impact upon organisational overhead costs as a proportion of the overall service price.
OUR APPROACH
Based on our proven benchmarking methodology, the our Transformation Team spent time with all of the SSD's senior leadership team in order to ensure that we had a good understanding of the DEFRA SSD services. In this way we were able to ensure that the comparative analysis was based on like-for-like comparisons.
OUTCOMES
The resultant analysis provided a number of significant findings in relation to:
-
Overall service cost and how this compares with other public sector and commercial sector providers.
-
The impact of overheads and direct costs upon the overall cost and where these varied from those seen in the comparator organisations.
-
The effect of volume (transactions) upon the cost model and how this impacted upon the comparative cost position of the DEFRA SSD.
Delivered, as ever, on time and within budget, the Client Management Team from DEFRA SSD were delighted with the outcome.