Anne Arundel County Public Schools, MD to save money through collaboration: Spikes Cavell publish case study.

Anne Arundel enters second year of successful deployment of the Spikes Cavell Observatory. Opportunities for collaboration with other k-12 school districts and Higher Education institutions identified in the drive to stretch every dollar in the budget.

Herndon, VA – 2 July 2012  – Anne Arundel County Public Schools, MD has entered that second year of its successful implementation of the Spikes Cavell Observatory. Spikes Cavell has published a case study to enable other public agencies to benefit from that experience.

Debbie Groat, Supervisor of Purchasing, Anne Arundel County School District, MD commented: “Anne Arundel County Public Schools are constantly evaluating our procurements and how we handle them. We monitor best practices across the nation and are very integrated with our colleagues on a national level. We participate in a number of national purchasing consortiums, and through that active involvement we are able to find the best price, best quality, and best service to support our teachers and students.”

Over the past 12 months, the Observatory has been used to deliver improved spend and contract visibility and in particular, to identify and evaluate opportunities for collaboration with other k-12 school districts and Higher Education institutions. The Observatory has already resulted in a productive conversations with community colleges in the county and in neighboring counties focussed on procurement projects that could be undertaken together to deliver ‘quick wins’. As more schools districts and other local organizations deploy the Observatory Anne Arundel County School District anticipates further collaboration across the region. In the meantime, the spend data from the Observatory supports the collaborative discussions they are already engaged in with other Observatory users in the State, including Montgomery, Baltimore, and Wicomico County school districts.

Debbie Groat added: “In these difficult economic times with money as tight as it is, there’s great interest in the procurement team working to stretch every dollar in the budget. Therefore, we’re looking for new points of leverage and are using the Spikes Cavell Observatory to do that. We’re looking at rebidding or renegotiating contracts that we already have with contractors to improve upon the value and services that we get from those relationships. She added “We try to do things cooperatively as much as possible and I use my connections to the Metropolitan Washington and Baltimore Regional Cooperatives as much as I can. In order to do that more effectively, I need to know where the opportunities for collaboration in our region are. Before we implemented the Observatory we didn’t have the have the spend visibility across multiple organizations that we needed. Now we do.”

Anne Arundel County Public Schools is also planning to deploy Spikes Cavell’s spotlightonspend transparency platform to enable citizens in the County and beyond to better understand where Anne Arundel County Public Schools spends taxpayers money on the goods and services it needs to run schools in the County.

Debbie Groat stated: “Transparency wasn’t the initial reason why we wanted to transform our spend data with Spikes Cavell, but it’s a competitively priced way to accomplish it quickly. In addition, you’re going to get more people involved in the spend analysis side of things and looking for savings opportunities.”

The Anne Arundel County Public Schools case study can be downloaded from http://www.spikescavell.com/casestudies/annearundelcasestudy.aspx

About Anne Arundel County Public Schools, MD

Anne Arundel County Public Schools is the public school district serving Anne Arundel County, Maryland. The Anne Arundel County school system is the 5th largest in Maryland, and the 43rd largest in the United States. The district has over 5,000 teachers supporting a comprehensive curriculum from Pre-K through 12th grade.

TAGS: Anne Arundel County Public Schools, collaboration, education, spotlightonspend, spend analysis, transparency, purchasing, data transformation, NIGP