Blogs

In 2014 we saw enterprises continue to embrace BYOD and focus more on enterprise mobility. In fact we wrote about the growing trend of bring your own device on our blog and some of the rules that you need to consider when allowing employees to bring their own smart devices and even laptops into your organisation.

Next year it’s a trend that is expected to continue to be high on the CIO’s agenda with the extension to CYOD (Choose You Own Device) or COPE (Corporate Owned Personally Enabled) as some enterprises fail to realise the anticipated benefits of BYOD.

We’ve worked with many public sector organisations, to help guide them through the complexities of EU Procurement Directives which apply whenever public sector authorities seek to acquire goods, services and works above a set threshold.

In short, these directives have been put in place to:

Controlling the cost of printing is the primary print management challenge faced by our clients, especially amongst SMEs. We’ve not yet reached the paperless office utopia that many dreamt about and in effect email has quadrupled most organisations' print volumes. Enterprises are still heavily reliant on printing and often don’t have the tools to track printing across all devices which can lead to significant and uncontrolled costs.

Apparently there are now more mobiles and mobile devices than toothbrushes in world. We are obsessed by mobile devices and fascinated by technology and the advances that they bring to our professional and private lives.

This fascination overspills into the corporate environment with increasing numbers of employees using their own devices to access company email, files and applications, be that as part of a formal BYOD (bring your own device) process or informally and under the governance radar.

We’ve reviewed hundreds of tender documents for clients in our roles as consultants in the tender procurement process for organisations looking to source new services. We’ve read through vast numbers of poorly-written and badly-conceived responses and a much smaller number of well-written and interesting documents which captivate the reader.

Needless to say, it’s the quality of the document as much as the price that will eventually win the coveted contract, so what advice can we give you from the reviewer’s point of view of what to do and what not to do?

One of our latest success stories is helping a client to save over £300K on their current IaaS contract with their existing supplier and establishing more client-centric contract terms with SLAs & KPIs to support their business needs. If savings like this can be made with existing suppliers, imagine the opportunities available to businesses that haven’t yet taken advantage of the opportunities that cloud services provide.

The team that runs your tendering process is responsible for ensuring the selection of the supplier capable of delivering the business' goals most effectively.

In order to achieve this they must:

When people come to us for help in taking on new supplier partnerships and contracts, or just reassessing their current providers, they quite often ask: “What are the main things we need to consider?”

Well, obviously, it depends on what they are trying to do. But we thought it would be usful to list our top 20, in order of importance (more or less), based on our experience over the past 2-3 years:

We have been preparing for a half-day seminar on bidding for competitive tenders and how to win the business. And that prompted us to look at our caseload of bid-writing and bid management projects, to glean some top tips. And it shouldn’t have surprised us that the actual bid-writing was the least of the challenges.

Sure, it’s always a scramble to get the bid done and submitted by the deadline. And honing a proposal so that it says exactly what you want it to convey to the customer, within a tightly limited word count, is not easy. 

Writing bid submissions, whether three or hundreds of pages long, takes time. So, why waste all that considerable time, effort and money if you will achieve nothing?

You have produced a detailed response that you believe contains all relevant information. However, looking back, you realise that reading the document and reviewing your response more thoroughly could have resulted in a very different and more compelling submission. Preparation and research could be the real difference between winning and losing your bid.