What does your culture say about how you want to be procured?

Is your organisation's culture one of collaboration or a competitive one?

This question was thrown in to stark relief this week as EvoEnergy withdrew from a significant tender that we had believed was our type of project where we could add more value than any of our competitors. We had decided to ignore many of the red flags that we attribute work opportunities which included:

1. Too many tenderers. Looking for five quotes on a complicated project puts four companies to a lot of wasted cost that has to be recovered from other clients.
2. Too broad a selection of tenderers. Our competitors ranged from national to micro-business. This demonstrates that the client does not really understand the project or the skills and resources that are best suited to delivering the scheme.
3. A vast series of amendments to a standard form contract. 120 pages of contract amendments and data that has probably taken a set of expensive lawyers considerably longer to assemble than we are given to tender is clearly wrong. I understand risk transfer, but when your contract partner is several orders of magnitude larger and sees the need to truss you up so tightly and not pay for your legal advice to unpick their contract then the warning lights should start to flash.
4. A load of data that is dumped upon us that we are meant to unravel and then use to carry out the design means that the consultant paid to issue the tender either does not understand the data or its relevance, or that it is cheaper to them to get the tenderers to do it. The challenge is that there are no guarantees with this assessment and the best understanding of the data, leading to the best value, may lead to the most expensive capital solution.
5. A consultant between us and our ultimate client. I suspect that the consultant was on a fixed fee to issue the tender, hence the ill conceived data dump. The cynic in me might anticipate that the same consultant would move to an element of time charge to manage the appointed contractor when many of these issues would likely come to light.
6. An inability to talk openly to anyone client side about project risk or project value. This demonstrates a team looking to procure a commodity rather than a service. Fine when procuring paperclips, but a complex construction and energy service generally requires an interactive procurement process, if best value is to be achieved.

The most significant lesson was though the challenge of tendering that the Evoenergy team faced. They are not skilled in competitive tendering like this. Our culture is one of solving issues quickly and effectively so that time and money is not wasted by either the client or Evoenergy. This is the collaborative nature that we are proud of at EvoEnergy. The alternative competitive culture where value is hidden and abortive work accepted to win a project is not one that we wish to foster at Evoenergy or one that will give the majority of our clients the value that for which we are known and which most clients deserve.

Mark Wakeford - Chairman of Evoenergy Ltd