Inside Foodbuy: Our Market-Leading Systems with Alastair Hayhurst

More and more organisations, both with in-house and outsourced procurement services from a variety of sectors, are using specialist systems and profiting from the many advantages they bring.

We’re talking improved control over spend and reduced time spent on manual tasks like processing invoices and placing orders.

To provide further insight, we caught up with Alastair Hayhurst, our Systems Development Director, to give you a sneak peek into Epsys – our specialist e-procurement and procure-to-pay (P2P) system!

1. Tell us about your role

As Systems Development Director, I manage our team based in Skipton Yorkshire; made up of over 15 strong development experts. Collectively, we have almost 100 years’ worth of experience working with Epsys, which means that as a team we know the system inside out!

My team’s daily mission is to develop, maintain and innovate on behalf of Epsys, ensuring it is always meeting our user’s demands and reporting accurately across all operations – not to mention ensuring the actual system infrastructure is running smoothly.

2. What do you think makes Epsys different?

Epsys is a longstanding system of choice for the foodservice and hospitality procurement sector.

Its agility allows you to be proactive but also reactive to real business challenges: actually, we have a regular pipeline of developments based on real challenges that the foodservice and hospitality business is experiencing.

Data is king in times of uncertainty; with Epsys, you can use data and insights to inform the decision-making process across your supply chain - helping to better forecast with your supplier partners and mitigate the likelihood of any supply shortages.

Compared to many other procurement partners in our industry who tend to license or buy from an external provider, our system is fully in-house.

Our Customer Experience team is also part of our Epsys service offer, providing dedicated support, making sure you get the most out of the system!

3. What’s the most exciting piece of development you are working on right now?

Well, we’re always working on exciting things! And with over 30% of our client’s spend focussed on non-food and the growth of the non-food category overall as a result of COVID-19, we have innovated on behalf of our clients, helping them to buy services smarter.

Marketplace brings together all of our services into the existing functionality of Epsys.

The benefits? There are many, but the core principles are:

Visibility of all non-food services spend
Optimisation of suppliers
Control over invoicing
Ease of finding service providers
Ratings and reviews for providers based on user feedback
A single platform to track all spend on services

This will be game changing for our clients and perfectly encapsulates our mission to help clients buy smarter. I’m really excited to be able to introduce this to our clients later this year!

4. Has it been a challenge onboarding new client to Epsys during the pandemic?

A challenge? Most certainly! However, leveraging our expertise, we successfully implemented Epsys for our long-standing client, the Nazareth Care Charitable Trust, with 100% of sites using the system in the first six months.

With the outbreak of COVID-19, the client needed to ensure a safe and secure supply chain throughout the pandemic. Savings and greater compliance were realised, ultimately leading to a very happy client, whilst really showing the full extent of what Epsys can do for our clients.

Streamline your procurement operation today

Business of all shapes and sizes are exploring how to shift away from traditional procurement services by adopting a specialist eProcurement or Procure to Pay (P2) system like Epsys.

If you would like to know more about our systems, please contact us here