It’s been a year since YPO launched its partnership with the Bid Toolkit, an online tendering guide and training platform set up to help suppliers write better bids for public sector contracts.
As a public sector buying organisation, owned by 13 local authorities that supplies products and services to a wide range of public sector customers, we’re bound by the EU Public Procurement Regulations. We know that submitting tenders for public sector organisations can often be a daunting and challenging process. Suppliers often struggle to increase and maintain win rates, finding their submissions don’t quite hit the mark.
Part of our mission with The Bid Toolkit is to help suppliers, including SME’s, to better understand the approach and requirements of the tender processes with the EU regulations, allowing them to maximise their opportunities for winning contracts.
Here at YPO, we invest time during our pre-procurement engagement activity with suppliers to discuss our requirements, to seek input into how specifications are shaped, including best commercial models and terms and conditions. We also recognise the cost associated with tenders, so providing support through the Bid Toolkit will help you as a supplier to improve the quality of your bids and the cost.
In the last 12 months, we have supported several breakfast events, designed to connect people who work on bids with procurement professionals - sharing best practice with topics including “what procurement wants to see.” Additionally, we have seen several suppliers access the digital Bid Toolkit training suite and attend some of our face to face training sessions with over 150 SME suppliers.
Bob Bradley, Group Sales Director at Harrow Green shared that “The course itself was comprehensive and we’ve found the combination of the training course to land the content with our people and the bid toolkit site to reinforce that best practice as a constant reference point and learning resource, right when and where we need it, is really very powerful.
Since the deployment in January we’ve already seen a noticeable improvement in win rates, an improvement in the bidding experience with everyone knowing the part we need them to play and what good looks like, as well as better adherence to our governance standards”.
For more information and details of the next training events please visit
ypo.co.uk/the-bid-toolkit