Shamayne Harris, head of procurement at Pagabo, shares valuable inside knowledge on how every business from SMEs upwards can give themselves the best chance of being considered for placement and unlocking a new income stream
There is often a misconception that frameworks are reserved for, or more suited to, larger organisations and not SMEs, but this simply isn’t true.
Frameworks are open to businesses of all sizes and the reluctance to bid for a framework often comes from a lack of clarity on how they can unlock opportunity for businesses of any scale.
First steps for getting your SME placed on a framework
The first step to recommend for all businesses interested in participating in public contracts is to register for the Find a Tender service, which will act as a trigger point for all upcoming opportunities. This will give a view of what is coming up in the market and allow them to resource accordingly ahead of time, whether that be for preparing the bid or ensuring the means to carry out work if selected.
Secondly – and a key component businesses often don’t consider – is the pre-market engagement piece. Framework agreements need to work for clients and the supplier market – and any good framework provider should be developing offerings that align what the client market actually needs and what the supplier market can offer. It is strongly recommended that businesses engage with framework providers bringing agreements to market at the earliest possible opportunity, ensuring all considerations are added in to the decision-making process when developing the offering before the Invitation To Tender (ITT) is finalised.
Businesses also need to be aware of all the tools available to help them with the process and must be willing to learn from external sources to further continuous development. Setting out the expectations of the procurement early on means that bidding organisations can effectively do a lot of the preparations before the framework opportunity comes to the market, such as preparing for standard selection criteria such as company information, accounts and policies. This can account for up to 50% of a submission – so can substantially reduce the administrative burden on the supplier resource and provide a greater opportunity for success.
Writing the bid
Many businesses believe that the only way to draft a successful bid is by acquiring a professional bid writer – but this isn’t the case. The intricacies of a bid do depend on the scope and complexity of the framework agreement, but a large majority of the market does bid direct – and can represent around 70% of bidding organisations for Pagabo’s frameworks.
The key is comprehensive documentation, which includes clear guidelines and route to submission. These documents should be completely transparent so organisations can rest assured that they won’t be coming across any hidden elements – and the forthcoming Procurement Act will increase levels of transparency throughout procurement life cycle too.
This all serves to increase participation, so in an ideal world, documents should be created so that even someone without a procurement background would be able to fill them in.
Improving your chances of success
The foundation of success is fully understanding the requirements. While an obvious point, the first step is thoroughly reading the tender documentation to get the full view of the necessary requirements – as well as any barriers for entry.
There is always the opportunity for bidders to ask questions or request clarification on any points, again serving the transparency point. All questions should be answered, whether to point a bidder in the right direction of the information or simply clarifying details making sure that any areas that people feel are unclear are addressed or ambiguities are removed.
The preparation phase is critical. This is a bidder’s opportunity to get ahead of the competition and ensure they are ready as they can be when bidding goes live.
Finally, bidders should take pride in a submission, making sure it has the real quality that portrays their business in the best light and showcases all of the points that answer the brief. Quality is the key word, with the weighting towards quality over price continuing to increase in time, serving to deliver the best value – not the bottom line.
Utilise the feedback process to deliver future SME framework success
Putting together bids costs both time and money, so framework providers should be giving as much thorough and comprehensive feedback as possible on where a bidder scored well and where there may be room for improvement. That way, those who weren’t selected can know what necessary changes to make next time around, driving continuous approvement across the wider industry. In the respect of total transparency, at Pagabo we also separate all feedback into positive and negative commentary, so bidders know where to place their efforts next time.
The format that Pagabo feedback will come in will firstly be a letter which demonstrates the success of the bid, followed by a number of appendices that model the bidder’s response against other responses within the same categories – this will also include details of the highest bidder’s score, which can be used as helpful benchmark.
Frameworks are a vehicle, so, whether a bidding organisation is an SME or a large-scale business, processes should support all. With a view to increase transparency and participation, changes from the forthcoming Procurement Act will further enhance the chance for any potential supplier to be appointed to frameworks – and unlock wider opportunity through those pipelines.
