COVENTRY: Jewson has signed a four-year deal to supply building materials to Coventry City Council’s Building Services team.
The contract is worth an estimated £2.4mpounds and is the culmination of an extensive tender process that began in 2009.
The new arrangement allows the Building Services team, which delivers planned maintenance and reactive repair to the Council’s residential properties and operational buildings, to consolidate all their materials purchasing through a single supplier resulting in significant cost and efficiency savings.
The team, which works across over 300 sites throughout Coventry, was previously purchasing materials from numerous different suppliers using purchase cards.
The new Jewson partnership has seen the merchant open a dedicated counter, solely for the use of the Building Services Team, at its Coventry branch in Humber Avenue. The branch will alter its merchandising policy to ensure that it always has a core range of identified products which are used most often by the Building Services team.
The branch also offers a van stocking service to enable more jobs to be completed in a single visit without the need for members of the Building Services team to return for specific parts or materials.
Using a single supplier also significantly reduces the administration for the Building Services team. Under the new partnership they will receive a single weekly invoice detailing all purchases, significantly reducing paperwork and administration costs to the council.
The contract is the latest in a line of similar public sector partnerships entered into by Jewson. The company now manages dedicated store programmes for housing associations and local councils throughout the country. Recently, Jewson has announced similar partnership deals with a number of new customers including Hyndburn Homes and Hounslow Homes.
Amanda Mayes of Coventry City Council is delighted with the new partnership: “For both financial and efficiency reasons it made sense to consolidate our purchasing of building materials. Jewson proved the best value, in the tender process. a
"The initial months of the contract are already delivering significant benefits to us. Jewson is a particularly important employer in the city, with its national headquarters at Binley and it is good to be working with an organisation with such strong local roots.”
John Heathfield, public sector sales manager from Jewson, is pleased to see the new partnership up and running: “We are delighted to be working with Coventry City Council and to be delivering a range of efficiency and cost savings to them. Partnerships such as these are becoming an increasingly important part of our business. They can make a huge difference to the budgets of our partner organisations and in the present economic climate that is a significant driver for everyone in both the public or private sector."
