Gem Go Live - On time and budget

@UK PLC is delighted to announce that GeM ( the Generic eMarketplace for higher and further education) has gone live today, exactly on schedule.

This is testament to the combined project team which was drawn from @UK, Procureweb and the higher education sector.  The timescales were testing for a national project with contract award in April and go live on the 1st August.  

Ronald Duncan Chairman of @UK commented “this is a landmark project from a number of different perspectives, it’s scale, speed to deploy and the fact that it will become self funding over the next two years.  The GeM model has generated significant interest both in the UK and overseas and we look forward to showcasing its success”

GeM demonstrates that it is possible to deploy a system, which will make major savings across a sector, quickly and effectively.  The eMarketplace and integrated contract management system holds all of the national and regional contracts for the sector and will be used by all institutions.

Having deployed the system at midnight the first users were logging in at 8am this morning.

The site is available at http://www.gem.ac.uk