unlock the portal

Chris Marriott takes an inside look at procurement…

Local authorities are really embracing “procurement e-portals” as a way of getting what they need aren’t they? I read somewhere that they provide a simple, secure and efficient means for managing tendering activities, reducing the time and effort required for both buyers and suppliers.

The idea is that a local authority uses an online portal to advertise an opportunity to the market. For example, in my line of work, it could be that they are looking to undertake a feasibility study for building something major like a new leisure centre, or they need some advice on how best to manage one. As potential suppliers, having signed up to the portal, we express an interest in the opportunity and read through the procurement brief to find out more about it.

Excellent concept, but how do they work in practice? Well, technically speaking they are fairly intuitive and easy to use. In almost every other respect, however, they work very badly indeed.

The problem lies in the fact that they tend to be used not as a portal at all. My dictionary defines a portal as an entrance or doorway leading into something, which would suggest that we can pass through it. Unfortunately, in the case of far too many local authority portals, despite having a welcome banner over the doorway, the door is usually firmly closed – locked and bolted by an agoraphobic procurement officer gatekeeper, who peers suspiciously through the spy-hole at anyone outside ringing the bell:  “Just leave it on the doorstep.”

When considering to bid through one of these portals, if we don’t already know the client we ask ourselves the same question - will they speak to us before we submit a proposal?

If the answer is no, we tend not to bid for it. Simple as that. We would guess that our counterparts in other competing organisations would do the same; the serious players, the ones who are best at what they do, are typically busy and tend to not to be in a position where they have to bid for long shots. 

The problem for the council is that this leads to a situation where they are likely to have very few good quality suppliers to choose from and their prospects of achieving best value are reduced.

As suppliers we have to speak to right person of course, the owner of the project – the actual human being within the local authority who will be taking responsibility for the project over the coming months, to whom we as leisure consultants will be reporting. It can’t all be contained in the project brief – there will be crucial pieces of information and parts of the story that can only be prised out through having a proper debate. Some of these missing pieces are important to help us create an appropriate proposition.

An early dialogue with external specialists can save a lot of time and (taxpayers’) money. Some councils seem to think that once they have written the brief and advertised the opportunity to the market it’s too late to change it. It’s not. You can always change direction if it becomes clear that it’s the right thing to do.

As a potential supplier to councils (typically of leisure-related advice) perhaps the single most frustrating thing about responding to a council’s brief is the uncertainty around how much time and support the client actually needs. This informs how we price it. Councils rarely, if ever, tell suppliers how much support they are likely to need and they certainly never give away any indication whatsoever of what their budget is.

As an example, when you’re looking to buy a new car you would not put out an advertisement to all local dealers saying “Car required. Dealers should deliver one car to my house…and then I’ll make up my mind which one I want.”  By providing further information you’d give some clue as to what your budget is without revealing what you have set aside. If you didn’t tell the dealers that you actually wanted new estate car you shouldn’t be disappointed when a Porsche, a Volvo Estate and a fairground dodgem arrives on the drive. You may well have a choice of three there but there’s only one that can you could seriously consider, i.e. you have limited your options. This sort of thing happens all the time in public procurement and it is one of its most serious failings, particularly in the leisure advisory market.

And portals will do little to help correct this or the other failings of public procurement – if anything they provide an opportunity for procurement officers to make it worse.

Please open your doors and let us in. You can always ask us to leave.

Chris Marriott (chris.marriott@capita.co.uk) is an Associate Director at Capita Symonds and a specialist in leisure management procurement.