Early engagement with the market in the ‘DEFINE’ stage of a programme or project lifecycle is critical in enabling project teams to achieve the best possible outcome from their future procurement competition. Developing an accurate understanding of your marketplace will allow better decisions to be made, by both buyers and bidders, in high risk, complex procurement projects. Good early engagement with potential suppliers routinely leads to better competition outcomes.
Good market engagement helps buyers explore how best to achieve value for money during their upcoming procurement. Buyers can test their assumptions and technical requirements with service providers or original equipment manufacturers to ensure the procurement objectives are achievable. Market engagement can include capturing rough cost data that will check affordability and ease passage through approval gates.
Effective market engagement will leave suppliers better informed and poised to respond effectively to your future tendered contract. Suppliers remaining interested at the end of market engagement are likely to be stronger, more viable contenders. Other suppliers will have consciously and accurately qualified themselves out of any potential future contract.
What is market engagement?
Regulation 40.
- Before commencing a procurement procedure, contracting authorities may conduct market consultations with a view to preparing the procurement and informing economic operators of their procurement plans and requirements.
- For this purpose, contracting authorities may, for example, seek or accept advice from independent experts or authorities or from market participants.
- Such advice may be used in the planning and conduct of the procurement procedure, provided that it does not have the effect of distorting competition and does not result in a violation of the principles of non-discrimination and transparency
Successful marketing engagement: key facts
Understanding what success looks like can be difficult without preparation and planning
Large set-piece events with an administrative burden and significant lead times, that require suppliers to travel, are not the only way to engage the market
Shrewd early engagement with suppliers will build rapport and forewarns the market that you are going to be an intelligent customer
Market engagement is 2-way. Managed information exchange is a pre-requisite to success
Analysis and exploitation of data is difficult. Data needs to be converted to information, which needs to be converted into knowledge, before supporting better decision making
How we can help
Our Expert Services:
- Help you reach more suppliers more efficiently
- Help you ask better questions to get better answers
- Help you choose the right channel for different types of information
requests - Facilitate deployment of specialist applications and tools; webinars,
online survey tools, requirements consultations, etc. - Facilitate expert analysis of captured market data
- Help you translate market engagement analysis into better strategic
programme and project choices
AWARD® Solution
- Providessecure and commercially confidentialsupplier portals across the Internet (up to OFFICIAL SENSITIVE) or across the MOD’s SLI (up to SECRET)
- Registers suppliers automaticallyvia a MOD published Internet URL or manually by an AWARD® administrator
- Removesthe need for adedicated Group Mailboxand reliance upon standard MS Office applications
- Is designed tosave time, reduce effort and reduce riskin managing supplier questions
- Provides ‘two-click’ all-points bulletin stylenotificationsand bilateral ‘Authority to supplier’confidential messaging
- Provides asingle point of truth– searchable and auditable
- Tracks supplier activityinside the portal (e.g. document access)
Productive and effective market engagement increases the chance of a successful competition
Planning and preparation of market engagement helps achieve successful outcomes
Commerce Decisions will help you plan and focus your market engagement activities with use of best practice techniques and approaches, our world-leading software solution and unrivalled multi-sector procurement experience. The development of market engagement themes can be a valuable exercise to undertake prior to starting your procurement. Focusing your engagement will generate better returns.
To find out more including how we can help make your next market engagement a success, please contact the team on info@commercedecisions.com
