Probrand MD, Peter Robbins, and Commercial Director, Chris Griesbach, discuss the www.theITindex.co.uk Innovations with HRH The Queen at a reception for Queen's Award winners at Buckingham Palace 14th July

An online ICT procurement site that has a track record of saving government and business time and money totalling £Ms, has won a Queen's Award for continuous innovation.

Probrand's CIPS accredited www.theitindex.co.uk is believed to be Europe's largest automated ICT catalogue that daily updates over 150,000 ICT products and services from more than 2,500 manufacturers ranked by best price and stock availability.

Technology services provider, Probrand, developed this online technology with support from partner supplier, Mercato Solutions, as part of its mission to provide the best priced ICT products in the shortest possible time.

Uniquely, www.theitindex.co.uk automates procurement comparisons down to a single unified price, eliminating timely phone negotiations and quickly enabling the best deal to be done within one secure environment without any 'punch-out' to supplier sites. This is the innovation the Queen's Award has recognised.

With over 400 Innovation category entries, the Queen's Award recognises Probrand has achieved the highest level of excellence in improving its performance and commercial success through continuous innovation over the last 5 years.

A recent innovation automates complex e-auctions as an additional step in reducing ICT purchase price and process. It daily gathers product demand from the market before pushing that opportunity back out to suppliers at 2pm every day. Suppliers then have the afternoon to bid price down to win that business.

Peter Robbins, Probrand Managing Director, said: "Our platform is changing the face of how public and private sector communities drive down the cost of buying ICT. With customer ERP system integration, we complete the automated purchase cycle.

"Our business is driven by transactional efficiency, not web advertising. We have to be acutely customer-centric, giving the buyer what they want - more efficient ways of getting competitive deals on ICT from across a hugely fragmented, multi-tiered supply chain. This is the innovation we bring.

"A thirst to deliver on that objective has seen continuous innovation in the Mercato technology behind www.theitindex.co.uk and year-on-year growth for the business and also, crucially, our supply chain partners.

"This technology is deployed globally for IBM as part of its 'Pre-Sales Advisor Tool' project across 37 countries in 22 languages. It is very rewarding to see this acknowledged with an internationally recognised mark of success."

www.theitindex.co.uk is the only procurement solution to be accredited by both the Chartered Institute of Purchase & Supply (CIPS) for offering 'excellence in procurement processes' and the Institute of Chartered Accountants for providing a "Best Practice, Best Value" e-procurement tool.

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