Tag Archives: Tenders

Opportunities

Posted on by
Road sign

So many possibilities….

On the 9th January 2023 the second reading of the Procurement Bill in the House of Commons took place. Set to come into force Spring this year, it is intended to improve and simplify the way public procurement is undertaken in the UK, with a keen focus on value for money, transparency and creating better opportunities for SMEs.

York St John University understands the value of working with SMEs and so the purpose of this blog is to advise SMEs of how to submit tenders, where, and provide a bit of background about York St John University and the type of procurement we do.

Our income is from our students (around 9000 at last count) and the majority of that is spent on the resources around delivering the courses such as academic fees, buildings, utilities, but it is so much more. In the last 2 years we have brought our catering in house and tendered for an open day shell scheme, sports kit for staff and students, external and internal audit services, apprenticeship support services, an Economic and Social Impact Assessment, project management course support, marketing agency services, a campus medical practice, pitch light installation and maintenance, heating, ventilation and air conditioning, to name but a few. Most of our procurement work has been for the York Campus, but we also support our London Campus.

Our opportunities are posted on the North Eastern Universities Purchasing Consortium’s (NEUPC) Delta Platform, but are also on the Governments Contract Finder. For a supplier they will need to go to https://neupc.delta-esourcing.com/ and register. The portal is a joint project between the universities of Bradford, Bishop Grosseteste, Huddersfield, Leeds, Leeds Arts, Leeds Beckett, Leeds Trinity, Lincoln, Northumbria, Teeside, York St John, along with the Royal Armouries. Registering on the portal does not mean you are an approved supplier, but it will give suppliers access to tenders which they can then choose whether or not to bid on.

Once on Delta,  suppliers can review the tender opportunities, review documents and when ready, bid. We ensure all our Invitation to Tender documents are created in as simple a format as possible, provide the required information as to what we are looking to procure, detailed specifications, information on how we want the the bid to be responded to and the weighting and scoring we will use for all the bids. We also need suppliers to complete a questionnaire within Delta which asks for general company, financial and legal information.  If you have any queries on the tender you can submit them via the Delta messaging service and we will create a Q&A so all suppliers have access to the same data. Once you have submitted your tender, and the deadline has passed Delta releases all bids so we can open and start our evaluation process.

So there you have it, how to do business with York St John University. The key actions I would suggest to any buyer wanting to work with York St John University are to: –

  • Register your company on https://neupc.delta-esourcing.com/
  • Please read the invitation to tender document carefully and ensure your response answers what we ask, and you provide the relevant evidence and look at the weighting associated to each element.

Happy bidding!

Squaring the Circle

Posted on by
A cartoon image of the boy wizard Harry Potter and a white owl

Procurement is magic

There is a moment in J. K. Rowling’s 4th Wizarding World movie – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – where Professor Dumbledore says to Harry, “We must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.”  Whilst it would be quite wrong to assert that procurement was the next closest thing to actual magic, it can sometimes seem that way to an outside observer.  Making sure things are done right is seldom easy, though if things work well then they may well give that impression.

When you work in procurement, you’re almost never buying goods or services for yourself or your own team.  In fact, in many large and complex organisations the things that you are buying often spill over to supply multiple teams and departments and collating all their individual needs and wants in to coherent purchases can be challenging.

A broomstick and a book of spells may not be part of a typical procurement professional’s toolkit – but at least a magic wand with a pointy end would be useful for emphasising a point during a meeting.  One of the more complex parts of a procurement and supply chain role is getting a cross functional team of stakeholders together to make a decision when evaluating bids after an invitation to tender.

The complexity comes in different aspects – for a start, the people who need to give their input to a decision may not normally work together or even be aware of the impact of their role on the matter in hand.  If you’re tasked with buying a travel booking service for use by the student recruitment team, there is no certainty that the IT team are aware of their requirements and vice versa.

Different teams will all have a valid input to make and being able to prioritise those views can be difficult, especially in a world of finite resources and competing objectives.  The Finance Dept. might want you to buy things cheaply, the technical teams might expect you to buy the highest specification and the operational teams might need you to buy whatever has the most comprehensive customer service support.

Setting the expectations of these internal teams is part of the vital groundwork that any successful procurement professional is accustomed to doing.  It requires the ability to gain confidence and that is not something that happens overnight.  Managing internal stakeholders and decision makers is just as valuable as taking care of the external supply chain.  Similarly, it’s not something that can be left until the moment that you need to go to market – getting those internal teams familiar with what you need from them during a tender and how you can work well together will help you achieve the right things for everyone and will even make them a whole lot easier.