UK.gov: Size matters, and we like it SMALL but MORE The government looks set to wave its procurement wand and make one-third of its £45bn per year procurement spend appear to go to SMEs by 2020. The Tory manifesto made noises about pumping 33 per cent of central government goods and services procurement into small to medium-sized businesses (SMEs) by 2020. Now that figure looks …
Plus, after you've gone all the way through the tender process and can demonstrate that you score more highly on functionality and value for money, they'll still just throw your bid out because your turnover is too low.
It's nice of them to let you invest all the effort in trying though instead of being honest about your chances at the PQQ stage though, isn't it?
Truth is procurement primarily goes to what once were publicly funded employees in a process designed by publicly funded employees so it isn't really surprising that this working method has yet to become unblocked and favours still publicly funded employees.
Attempting to unblock it must have been going on for at least 30 years.
The bureaucracy involved is (or was unless it has changed) chilling - European level, National level, local level (is there such a thing any more or is it another term for the public works department?)?
Then there is BT, or ... (usually gas, water or leccy utilities?) ...
1) Make sure you've spent enough on wining and dining MPs and Civil Servants
2) Make sure you've offered enough Directorships which pay six figures for 24 hours work a year
3) Offer the moon on a stick whilst claiming it will only cost peanuts
4) Get your people to write a nicely vague contract with ambiguous terms that give you lots of get out clauses and golden lifeboats when you fail to deliver what you've promised
5) Profit!
Most contract winners have more employees in the bidding team than an SMB employs.
When the government says SMB, they mean 250 employees
For public sector people it is all about risk, they would rather pay more from a large business because they have ticked all their boxes.
After 20 years of trying we no longer bother with the bureaucracy.
It will NEVER change.
Commentators sounds like a lovely potatoe based snack.
I'm curious about what they mean by procurement. Here in the U.S. procurement is the purchase of equipment, the reason we buy Cisco and Juniper is partially driven by the knowledge that we can hire people familiar with those vendors as much as it is about the hardware itself and that it is built by U.S. companies which matters to the intelligence community.
But the comments sound like they are talking about awarding contacts to subs instead of primes. Lockheed Martin is a prime, they get awarded large contracts, but when they bid or after they win they usually have several subcontractors to try and fill all the slots.
We have a 3% requirement for SMBs, such as women owned, veteran owned, native American owned etc.
So, they want to award contacts to smalls at that large a rate?
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