Blogs

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.

I am sure that everyone’s childhood would have involved having Aesop’s fable ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ recited to them at some point. A fable tends to be a short story, typically with animals as characters always conveying a moral. So what did we learn from ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’? I know for myself it was along while ago since I last heard the fable, so let’s quickly recap.

The OJEU procedures state that all contracting authorities have to issue a Standstill Notice at the point of decision regarding award of a contract. This notice allows tenderers 10 days to contest the award of contract before it is issued and implemented.

The Standstill Notice (also known as the Award Decision Notice and Regulation 86 Notice) needs to be sent to all tenderers and must include: