The British Yearly Meeting (BYM)
The British Yearly Meeting (BYM)
About the organisation:
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) is a church, a charity and a company: the charity supports the church, and the company supports the charity. BYM’s overarching purpose and vision is to guide all of the charity’s more detailed strategies and work programmes.
BYM’s purpose is to further the general religious and charitable purposes of Quakers in Britain and beyond. In particular, they work to:
- sustain the Quaker church and faith
- support Quaker meetings
- raise awareness of Quakerism
- express Quaker witness through action
What help did they require?
We first met the BYM team in 2016 when they attended the Procurement Foundations course, we ran with NCVO. Following this training BYM embarked on their Procurement Journey putting in place structure and controls.
In 2018, we were approached to review the set-up and provide recommendations on achieving best practice and moving up the procurement maturity curve.
How did you do it?
Using our SMARTdiscovery framework we conducted in-depth analysis to gain clarity on the buying behaviour across the charity and company. We analysed spend data, reviewed existing policies and processes and reviewed key contracts for compliance and potential risks.
We delivered back our findings and made recommendations on how to adopt and embed best practice procurement.
Engaging with the in-house Procurement group we drafted a new Procurement strategy aligned to the organisations goals and built a Procurement policy that met the requirements of both the charity and the company.
Using our Sourcing 2 Supervision approach we developed a tailored Procurement Process and kicked off roll out with a Procurement Foundations training course. We have continued monthly training courses and drop in sessions to support the wider BYM community.
The Results
BYM now has a much more structured way of working and strategic plan of how to achieve savings and work effectively going forwards. The monthly training courses on the new procurement process have helped develop all staff knowledge and understanding on procurement and the steps they require to follow when making their own purchases from small risk/ low spend to high risk/ high spend. It has everyone within BYM thinking and talking about best practise. From this we have developed the ‘Supplier Minimum Requirements’ which is a set of standards suppliers have to meet to be able to carry out work for BYM. This is unifying BYM into working to the same standards and bringing processes together.
Through carrying out the procurement set up for BYM and rolling out this new way of working we have now continued to grow within BYM and are now helping them deliver some of their high risk, high value projects such as CRM, where we work closely with the subject matter experts to deliver the project.
“Novo-K really got to know and walked alongside us as we developed our procurement culture and capability. The support we received is excellent. As well as providing value for money, they have helped us to start focusing on opportunities and the added value achievable from structured procurement and supplier management.”
