Tender planning meetings are a vital part of every successful bid. None more so than the kick-off meeting. It’s your ideal opportunity to provide key information, assemble content experts, gain buy-in from essential stakeholders, assign tasks and motivate the entire bid team.

Whilst content and personnel will vary from bid to bid, the meeting process can be distilled into a set of best practices which should be followed each time. After presiding over countless tender launch meetings, our bid experts have created a set of meeting blue prints to ensure effective tender launch meetings.

Presented in two sections, we’ve published a set of pre-meeting activities to maximise value on the day and a 13-point plan to ensure you achieve all your meeting objectives. Read more.

Demonstrating social value in tenders, PQQs and SQs is not new, but it has evolved. The tokenism of the past, where Corporate Social Responsibility commitments were not scrutinised too deeply, have long gone. Today, social value needs to have a real, measurable and demonstrable impact.

We are seeing some commissioning authorities increasing their social value scoring. Overall bid weightings of 20% allocated to social value are not uncommon. 

So, what type of social value questions are being asked? And how should they be answered?

See our blog post to find out.

With Brexit negotiations hanging in the balance, we thought it would be useful to signpost Bid Buzz readers to the latest government updates regarding outcomes for the public sector procurement process in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Last updated 12 March 2019, The UK Government has published guidance here.

It provides information for contracting authorities, bidders and other interested parties. The key points can be summarised as follows:

The guidance also contains useful detail about other e-notification systems to be used to inform suppliers about new opportunities.

March 2019 saw invitations to tender issued by Highways England seeking bids for the East region construction framework £330m. A timely reminder to highways contractors that there will soon be more opportunities to follow as the government will roll out its second Roads Investment Strategy (RIS2) covering 2020-25.

A pot of £25.3bn has been set aside for this which is a 40% increase on the current RIS1. The final RIS2 will be published later this year. Keep your eyes peeled!

Specific strategic studies are also underway to develop options for the Oxford to Cambridge expressway, M60 Manchester north-west quadrant and A66 (North Trans-Pennine). These transformational investment programmes, which will need to be implemented over several RIS periods, will present more bidding opportunities.

Discover how our team of professional bid consultants can support your highways bids.

Read our recent highways case study.