smartsm - the world's leading stock procurement solution

By working closely with a range of library suppliers, we have been able to develop our unique and powerful Stock Procurement Module. It has been designed to streamline the procurement process, eliminate wasteful purchases and also bring automated, web-based performance management tools to library stock selection.

Evidenced Based Selection Specification

Whether you select or buy stock yourselves or via supplier selection, smartsm allows you to create very detailed specifications at collection and branch level - in seconds.

Flexible

These specifications can be built up in very flexible ways to accommodate most buying profiles - i.e. buying for a specific branch or collection, buying for a number of branches or collections, ad-hoc purchases as well as across the entire service.

Powerful

Not only can we show you your stock performance in your own collection terms, but we can also show it to you BIC code by BIC code and/or Dewey range by Dewey range. This then gives you the ability to create specifications in new ways - perhaps where your current catalogue doesn't allow for.

Integrated

smartsm now allows all of your specifications to be output electronically to your book supplier - reducing the effort of transcribing information.

What's working for everyone else?

When making decisions around stock selection, it might be useful to see what was being issued, reserved and purchased (pre-publication) by public libraries elsewhere.

smartsm aggregates usage from all of our customers at a very granular level allowing you to get some hints on what's working well in other library services.

Holding Records

Usefully, against all of these results you can see your holding records. This means you can make selections such as - "show me things I don't own - within a specific range, that are issuing well locally" etc.

Caution!!

BUT - just because a particular author or title is issuing well elsewhere DOES NOT mean you need it! If evidence, provided UNIQUELY by from smartsm, suggests that your specific audience doesn't read such material - then don't buy a copy because, as we know, not all libraries are the same !

Receipt of materials

smartsm's powerful monitoring suite gives you a detailed breakdown of the materials you have received, order by order, and show what genre (BIC or your collection terms) or Dewey ranges they were in. This then allows you to see how the receipted materials compare with the proportions you specified in the budget, order or contract.

Performance management

Importantly, we can now see how well our procured material has performed once it has entered the service. This is increasingly important when trying to drive more value from our book funds and trying to eliminate waste. If you wish, you can give your book suppliers a log-in to smartsm so they can see with you how well the material is performing. This then enables discussions about how you might set targets for average issues / item for selected material - and smartsm provides a sophisticated and consistent way of managing and communicating this information.