In April 2019 Glasgow City Region launched a two year pilot IT system, Cenefits, to manage and maximise the delivery of community benefits secured through City Deal contracts.
The IT solution, initially developed for Edinburgh City Council, was refined following feedback from City Region procurement staff. The pilot sought to test the system’s effectiveness in managing community benefits for City Deal contracts with a view to formally adopting it and rolling it out to non-City Deal contracts.
An extensive launch plan included four pre-implementation training and capacity building sessions in April 2019 for officers, suppliers and delivery partners; testing of developments and additional features between May and July 2019 and two webinars in August 2019 to internal and external stakeholders in partnership with the Supplier Development Programme (SDP).
In late 2019, a number of training and support sessions were delivered to key officers and all historical City Deal data was uploaded to the system for Cenefits to become the ‘Single Point of Truth’. Information downloaded from Cenefits was used for the 2019-2020 annual contract and community benefit update covering the period up to 31 March 2020.
This demonstrated significant improvements in performance across community benefit KPIs. At the end of March 2020, 145 City Deal contracts with a value above £50,000 had been awarded, equating to an overall total of over £222 million.
The use of Cenefits to report and monitor performance has improved the accuracy and reliability of data, and it has made the collation and analysis of data a much easier exercise.
An evaluation of Cenefits was carried out by the Glasgow City Region Intelligence Hub and reported to Cabinet in June 2020. The key findings of the report were positive and highlighted a number of opportunities for future development of the system.
