Successful early Market Engagement is crucial to ensure you get exactly what you expected from bidders. But done badly, you risk suppliers feeling unsatisfied, disengaged and unlikely to deliver what you’re looking for.
MOD Commercial have actioned project teams to work closely when engaging with suppliers, highlighting the importance of alerting the market to potential future requirements as early as possible.
The UK Procurement Act 2023 now places greater importance and focus on Market Engagement, and activities in this area are governed by new rules designed to enhance transparency, fairness and accountability.
Written specifically with our UK MOD audience in mind, in this blog we’ll take a quick look at how you can ensure you successfully engage the market to deliver best possible project outcomes. As MOD colleagues, you also have access to DSP AWARD® which is designed specifically to help you.
Before I share my top tips for success, let’s take a quick look at what we mean by Market Engagement; activities conducted by contracting authorities before issuing a tender notice aiming to:
- Develop procurement requirements and approaches.
- Design procedures, participation conditions, and award criteria.
- Prepare tender notices and associated documents.
- Identify potential suppliers and likely contractual terms.
- Build supplier capacity related to the contract being awarded.
Market Engagement can take various forms, such as supplier days, questionnaires, workshops, site visits, and product demonstrations. These engagements help authorities understand market capabilities and inform procurement strategies.
What do I need to do under the Procurement Act 2023?
Under the new regime, key actions you need to take for Market Engagement include:
- Publishing a Market Engagement Notice or providing justification for its absence.
- Maintaining comprehensive records of Market Engagement activities.
- Ensuring equal access to information for all potential bidders.
- Managing conflicts of interest and promoting small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) participation.
By following these guidelines, as a contracting authority, you can effectively engage the market while complying with the new procurement regulations.
So as the experts in Market Engagement, supporting clients across the globe including MOD Programmes and Projects, what do we advise teams to do?
1. Set objectives and plan ahead
Having Market Engagement objectives in place stimulates and assesses the market. This can help suppliers become better bidders by understanding your requirements, needs and expectations.
Suppliers can substantially enhance your understanding of the marketplace and allow you to further test and confirm certain aspects of the project team’s approach. These objectives should drive the Market Engagement plan, activities and resourcing.
While there are no fixed timelines for Market Engagement:
- Allow Sufficient Time: Provide adequate notice for suppliers to prepare for Market Engagement activities.
- Multiple Engagements: If conducting multiple Market Engagement stages, describe the process in the Market Engagement Notice. Additional notices are only necessary if significant scope changes occur.
2. Publish Notices
This isn’t just our advice – it’s a legal requirement. Under the Procurement Act 2023, you are now required to publish procurement notices on the Cabinet Office’s Find a Tender service. This Central Digital Platform is designed to enhance transparency, streamline procurement processes, and promote fair competition across the UK public sector. Aside from the legal requirement to do so, other reasons why notices must be published on Find a Tender include:
a. Enhanced Transparency: The Act introduces a series of transparency notices that must be published at various stages of the procurement lifecycle. These notices are intended to provide visibility into procurement decisions and processes, allowing the public and suppliers to understand how contracts are awarded and managed.
b. Centralised Access: Find a Tender serves as the central repository for procurement notices, replacing multiple previous platforms. This centralisation simplifies access for suppliers and ensures consistency in the publication of procurement information.
c. Support for SMEs: By standardising and simplifying the publication of procurement opportunities, the new system aims to make it easier for SMEs to access and compete for public contracts. The government has emphasised the importance of supporting SMEs in public procurement to drive economic growth and innovation.
DSP AWARD® can support with publishing notices – you can create your notices from one page, using a ‘dynamic’ form, which changes to reflect the option you chose. Once you have inserted the details, you can save ‘draft’ the notice, or validate the notice, to send it out to the Central Digital Platform (Find a Tender).
All existing notices will be seen on the same one page, for all the previous notices you have drafted and sent out, for your programme or project – as the screenshot shows:
3. Consider high level drivers
Each project must consider what the high-level drivers are for the potential procurement, as well as the Market Engagement themes. (These could include Procurement Approach, Solution Performance, Information Sharing, Deliverability, Commercial Approach and Value Management threads.)
Every aspect of this is vitally important as it will underpin any decisions and choices that are made, informing the procurement strategy, scenario testing (Value for Money), negotiation and eventually contract management.
4. Be robust, fair and compliant – scrutiny is watching
Scrutiny/CASDD will focus on the way in which Market Engagement operates, examining the evidence that underpins a particular business case or other approval, and looking at processes and the quality of the end results. There are core evidence requirements during Stages 1 and 2 in a typical procurement that you must be able to illustrate:
- An assessment of the market available to supply the requirement
- Analysis of the position of the supplier(s)
- Details of an industrial issue, sustainability of the industry sector or critical sub-contractors
- Evidence that the customer is content that the requirement to be shared with industry meets its needs
- Statements indicating which requirements are not yet confirmed/finalised
- Draft requirements which could impact on cost/price and allocation of risk
To uphold integrity:
- Avoid Unfair Advantages: Ensure Market Engagement participants do not gain preferential treatment.
- Prevent Distortion of Competition: Share PME insights with all bidders to maintain a level playing field.
- Address Conflicts of Interest: Identify and manage any potential conflicts arising from PME activities.
- Encourage SME Participation: Consider barriers faced by small and medium-sized enterprises and promote their involvement.
This means every decision you make needs to be robust and transparent so you can act in the confidence that it won’t be successfully challenged. By routinely having an accurate understanding of your marketplace through early engagement, you’ll be able to make better decisions throughout your project.
5. Manage your market data
Securely managing your data gives you peace of mind and helps you to readily manage multiple communications with bidders, as well as controlling what access levels your project team members have. This means you can easily locate information from bidders, search for specific information and issue updates and announcements efficiently.
These obligations are furthered by the Procurement Act which states you must:
- Maintain Records: Document all PME activities and information exchanged.
- Ensure Transparency: Share relevant information gathered during PME with all potential bidders to prevent unfair advantages.
- Comply with Record-Keeping Obligations: As per section 98 of the Act, maintain an audit trail of Market Engagement activities.
6. Make use of the DSP AWARD® Solution
And finally, to implement and support all the above tips, utilise the DSP AWARD® Solution, for which the UK MOD has an enterprise-wide licence.
Via DSP AWARD®, we can help teams plan for early Market Engagement as well as design and conduct effective engagements and publish notices. We’ll ensure you reach more suppliers more efficiently, ask better questions to get better answers, and translate analysis into better strategic programme and project choices.
This is all supported and evidenced by the AWARD® Market Engagement module (Plan) which showcases your adherence to the principles of fairness, equal treatment and transparency.
Take a look at how this works in practice with an example from the £800m Mobile Fires Platform Project: https://commercedecisions.com/resource/market-engagement-success-for-the-uk-mods-800m-mobile-fires-platform-project/
If you would like to know more about Market Engagement, DSP AWARD® or for further procurement support, please contact Samantha Bevan-Talbot: samantha.bevan-talbot101@mod.gov.uk.
