01
Procurement strategy
Traditional, design and build, management or two stage, chosen against the certainty of your design, your programme pressure and the risk you are actually willing to hold. Not the route the last scheme used.
Service 03
Tendering and procurement
The right builder on the right contract
Procurement decides how much risk you keep and how much you pay somebody else to carry. We structure the route, the documents and the contract so that bids are genuinely comparable and liability sits where you intended it to sit.
What you get
Deliverables.
01
Route and contract selection, JCT and NEC
02
Tender documentation and pricing schedules
03
Bid analysis and negotiation support
The problem
The lowest bid and the cheapest project are not the same thing.
Tenders are rarely comparable when they arrive. They are made comparable, and that work is where the money is either protected or lost.
One bidder has excluded the temporary works. Another has qualified the programme. A third has priced the drainage as a provisional sum because the survey was not issued. All three headline figures sit in a spreadsheet looking like alternatives to each other, and the lowest one gets recommended.
The gap closes later, through variations that were always going to happen, and the contractor selected on price becomes the contractor with the strongest claim position. Procurement is not an administrative stage. It sets the commercial terms of everything that follows, including how a final account will eventually be argued.
What we do
From route selection to a recommendation you can defend.
02
Contract advice
Selection of the form and a commercial read on the amendments: payment terms, change mechanism, liquidated damages, caps and the risk allocation your funder will need to see. Legal drafting stays with your solicitor.
03
Tender documentation
Pricing documents built on measured quantities, with the scope split so that packages have clean boundaries and nothing falls between two of them.
04
Tender list and enquiry
A list appropriate to the size and type of scheme, with capacity and appetite tested before the enquiry goes out. Four bidders who want the job beat eight who are covering.
05
Bid analysis
Qualifications and exclusions stripped out and normalised, arithmetic checked, preliminaries and overheads tested, and the rates examined for the ones that are loaded against likely change.
06
Negotiation and award
Post-tender clarification, negotiation of the outstanding commercial points, and a recommendation report that sets out the basis of the decision for your board or your funder.
No frameworks. No preferred bidders. No introduction fees. The tender list is built for your scheme.
Why our procurement advice is independent
We are not a contractor and we do not run a supply chain. There is no relationship on our side that benefits from a particular firm winning, and nobody pays us to appear on a list.
That sounds like a small thing until you have watched a tender list assembled from relationships rather than from the requirements of the job. The composition of the list determines the outcome more than the analysis afterwards does, which is why we treat it as a commercial decision and record the reasoning.
Questions
Procurement, answered directly.
Two stage or single stage?
It depends on whether you need the contractor's input before the design is fixed, and on how much price certainty you need before you commit. Two stage buys buildability input and an earlier start but weakens your position at the second stage, when you are negotiating with one party. Single stage buys competition and certainty but needs a design that is genuinely complete. We will give you a recommendation with the trade-off stated, not a preference.
Do you provide legal advice on the contract?
No. We advise on the commercial effect of the contract terms: what the payment mechanism means for cash flow, how the change provisions will operate when a variation lands, where the risk sits and what your funder will expect to see. Drafting and legal opinion are for your solicitor, and we work alongside them rather than around them.
Can you run the tender if we already have a cost plan?
Yes. We will test the cost plan first, because taking a plan to market without checking what sits underneath it usually produces a surprise at tender return. If the plan is sound we say so and proceed. In the event that the quantities behind it are thin, it is far cheaper to know that before the enquiry goes out than after.
What does a bid analysis actually give us?
A comparison on a normalised basis, a schedule of every qualification and exclusion with the value attached to it, an assessment of which rates are exposed to change, and a recommendation with the reasoning recorded. The document is written so it can go to a board or a lender without being rewritten.
Related
What usually comes next.
Cost control and variations
Holding the commercial position through the contract you have just signed.
Cost planning and estimating
The benchmark the tenders are measured against.
Lenders and funds
How the procurement route reads to the party lending against it.
Insights