Procurement Management

Underpinning our delivery cycle procurement philosophy, is our understanding that client identified requirements, objectives and outcomes set the path of any project, towards success or failure.  We also believe that a clear vision, combined with proactive industry engagement, will avoid ‘scope creep’ and its associated programme delays and cost increases.  We are certain too that procurement needs to influence service delivery outcomes and promote continual improvement and learning.  This understanding drives us to work with public and private sector clients to help establish best practice procurement and delivery solutions.

We have learnt that our clients need to put optimal organisational structures, knowledge, skills and resources in place early and maintain them throughout the procurement process.  They need to monitor delivery progress, effectiveness and team and supply chain performance by development of a small, but comprehensive, number of ‘SMART’ KPIs - these indicators also being used too to identify and steer team training and development needs.  Our clients can lean on our experience and we support them by embedding our people in their teams.

RedIRay helps our clients gain early internal and external political acceptance of innovation in procurement.  We facilitate market testing to help selection of the right solution.  We believe in supporting engagement, including consultation and sharing of learning, particularly when clients are trying to deliver complex service outcomes such as those related to the environment and diversity.  Our team is experienced in working with: service and project customers; stakeholders; special interest groups; service providers; the wider supply chain; and, other industry clients.  We help clients balance and prioritise these costs against savings and benefits. 

Scale of risk, number of activities and project or service complexity are main factors that define the: specification; contract form; options to be used; format of tender quality evaluation; and, drive the quality / price ratio to be adopted and key quality aspects to be considered.  Our team is experienced in developing, reviewing and responding to contract documentation, Pre-Qualification Questionnaires, Invitations to Tender and to negotiate.  Heavily involved in tender evaluation we help clients assess: team and supply chain experience and flexibility; project understanding; and, delivery team calibre.  We support clients with process development and associated staff training.

Experience, gained across the whole industry, helps us identify factors that affect price stability and affordability.  We understand that developing proposals via comparison with successful projects and learning from failure is essential.  Our skilled team develops pricing models to help drive down and prove real cost, affordability and enable sensitivity checks.  They understand how to get the best out of providers – eg: turnover and budget certainty will be key for them too as these relate to overheads and bear directly on financial contribution.  We have proven that working together with providers can result in proactive changes that produce savings and enable budget reductions.

Uniquely, we understand that mobilisation does not finish on day one, but goes on as a transition and continual improvement process that should be managed by a joint client / provider team.  To deliver the planned project benefits the project team needs to work together to achieve ‘mutual objectives’ – a key tenant of Partnering.  We are experienced in developing and facilitating collaborative relationships and the development of incentivisation mechanisms that the provider values and that produce improved outcomes for our clients. 

Projects and services our team has been involved in include: Highways Maintenance Term Contracts, Major Projects and DBFO delivery for TfL; Maintenance, Improvement and Major Projects delivery for the HA on numerous MAC and TMC contracts – most notably M25 (Area 5) and M6 and Birmingham Box (Area 9); and numerous Local Authority contracts, including – DLO externalisations (Herts CC), TMC contract re-lets (North Yorkshire).  Please see Case Studies section for more details.

Our procurement management specialist is Chris Connor.  As Director Road Network Management at Transport for London (TfL), he led the letting of three term contracts covering maintenance and improvement of the TfL Road Network, each worth around £35m on an annual basis.  In the private sector he was Project Director of the M25 Sphere management contract and was a Board Member and key player in the development of the highly successful AmeyMouchel joint venture.  He sits on the IHT’s Procurement & Delivery Board.  Please contact Chris to discuss you needs further.