We were thrilled to attend the eWorld Procurement and Supply event on 5th March in London.
In light of this exciting event, we wanted to share with our community the work we have done with Orbitá to create a platform to benefit public sector organisations when making decisions about procurement and suppliers.
Business needs
Orbitá is an innovative technology start-up, which sought out the opportunity to better connect those working with suppliers in the public sector.
With extensive knowledge of the sector, Orbitá identified a unique opportunity to build a platform where public sector organisations could collaborate and share information about their suppliers, as well as seeing the spend transactions they were all making.
The platform being created would act as a point of reference as well as an analytical resource exclusive to those in the public sector; an application which mimicked some of the aspects of directories and review sites such as TripAdvisor and LinkedIn combined with analytical tools using data harvested from public sources.
Our Solution
Using our knowledge of database, analysis and digital design, we created the Orbitá platform and a range of user apps. The flexible app-based design can easily respond to new user needs and provides a secure community platform to enable supplier analysis, monitoring and feedback. In addition, it provides easy access to a wealth of data and other community information, taking data transparency to a new level and providing a robust platform for further app development.
The platform takes data that already exists in public domain and pools it into one convenient location. Working in partnership with the Orbitá team, data from all sources is cross referenced making it more usable and valuable to members. The software also provides valuable messaging and knowledge sharing tool, enabling quickly accessible information, such as Social Value initiatives linked to suppliers or alerts regarding changes. Our skills in database design means the platform is quick and responsive when handling large data volumes.
There are two version of the platform. Orbitá Lite gives public sector users FREE access to all the data, promoting transparency and data sharing. The subscription service, Orbitá Plus, opens up the full range of collaboration and monitoring features.
The application was developed using lean and agile techniques and took 3 months to develop. To date, the platform has over £110bn of spend transactions, some 350,000 suppliers and is growing fast.
Technologies:
PHP in the Laravel framework
Vue.js
MySQL