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New car leasing portal project for PDMS

New car leasing portal project for PDMS

Foundations Development Framework To Underpin UK Pan-Government Procurement Website

The NHS Purchasing & Supply Agency (NHS PASA) has appointed PDMS to develop a pan-government car leasing portal. The announcement comes following a competitive tender process initiated through the OGCbuying.solution’s Catalist Framework.

“The new pan-government framework is a major advance in car leasing for the UK government, and we are very proud to have been selected to develop its web presence to make it easy for users to access the full range of benefits,” said Chris Gledhill, Managing Director PDMS Limited. “We had already developed a car leasing website for NHS PASA to allow staff who have responsibility for fleet to search for cars and compare suppliers, now we're going to build on it, and open it up to central and local government organisations across the UK.”

NHS PASA Spokesperson explained, “The framework provides the public sector with access to very competitive terms and discounts of about 3%. Some models, such as the fuel efficient hybrid Toyota Prius, are available at much greater discounts. Through the new framework, NHS PASA alone will save an extra 1% on top of our already very competitive lease rates.”

The new portal will combine the best elements of the NHS PASA vehicle leasing website together with innovative features available for the first time to the wider public sector. Users will be able to:

  • select from a wide range of criteria including manufacturer / model / vehicle type / fuel type / transmission / emissions / price and more
  • access news, contract details, supporting information, etc
  • manage system users within a number of different profiles each allowing a specific range of functions
  • access the most up-to-date information from each supplier to make an effective price comparison
  • request a login identity online
  • access the ‘Master Hire Agreement’, terms and conditions and specifications, and
  • access supplier email addresses, websites and special offers.

The site is driven by two sources of data: car specification data provided by Motor Research, and ‘rate books’ from the lease car suppliers. To ensure the data is kept up to date, there is a facility for suppliers to upload information directly. Site administrators then queue the files for import and process them overnight, to avoid any disruption of service to users. In addition to this, the new site will be able to “poll” individual webs services provided by each supplier to give the user “real-time” car lease prices using a number of leasing profiles.

The portal will be built using. FoundationsTM, PDMS's own .Net -based software development framework. With FoundationsTM, 70 per cent of code is standardised to drastically reduce development time in comparison to most bespoke projects. FoundationsTM covers complex security, resilience and performance management needs and removes a significant amount of the complexity in website development. FoundationsTM incorporates best practice standards and complies with data protection and accessibility legislation.

PDMS recently won an award for central e-Government excellence in Procurement for their work on the NHS PASA's online pharmaceutical catalogue, also developed with Foundations TM.

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