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For 20+ years, we’ve been successfully ‘delivering best possible outcomes on complex procurements’. This phrase has become a key part of our identity: it’s what we do, and why we exist.
But what do we actually mean by ‘best possible’, what do these outcomes really look like for you, our customers, and why is it so important?
Below, we’ve included some thoughts from across our global team on what delivering best possible outcomes means to us at Commerce Decisions.
1. We’ve fully understood your requirements
It’s living and breathing our customers’ goals to ensure we deliver excellence.
Elliott Taylor, Solution Specialist, Global
On day one with any client, our first task is helping to establish exactly what you want to achieve, and breaking this down into clear objectives so that we can build them into the evaluation design.
Every customer and project is unique, it’s therefore essential to have a flexible approach and look at each project from an individual perspective. This may involve helping to unpick some of the complexity you’re dealing with so we can build a solution that aligns with your strategic objectives. Having a clear understanding of what success looks like from the start helps test assumptions and technical requirements to ensure your procurement objectives are achievable. Being able to identify, document and agree on a project’s requirements in a collaborative and transparent manner means that any stakeholder concerns that may delay progress are uncovered and ensures delivery of the best solution from suppliers.
2. You’ve achieved real value for money
It’s a combination of factors, including how well the team collaborated, the control over the procurement process and ensuring the taxpayer’s money is being spent wisely.
Samantha Bevan-Talbot, MOD Account Director, UK
For any organisation, delivering the best value for money from your procurement is critical to its ultimate success. But it’s not always easy to achieve as many of the traditional methods are flawed. That’s why we created our Real Value for Money (RVfM) solution. With RVfM you can be confident you’ve achieved real value for money at the end of your project and that you haven’t paid more than you needed to.
With increased scrutiny on public spend, there is more focus than ever on demonstrating that your budget has been allocated responsibly. This means you’re accountable for every decision you make. RVfM forces procurement teams to think about what value for money is – to establish a tipping point at which a more expensive, higher-quality tender or a lesser-quality, cheaper tender provides you with the best value for money solution. It’s the ability to understand what money can be saved as well as how to avoid wasting public funds, that ultimately delivers the best value for money solution possible.
3. You’ve achieved the result you wanted and expected
Truly successful outcomes are dependent on transparency, effective engagement with the marketplace, and the unified creation of a procurement strategy that focuses on delivering the desired project goals for all stakeholders.
Richard Malin, Account Director, UK
Our proven and successful approach to strategic procurement places firm importance on supporting you to get the solution you wanted, regardless of who wins the competition. In simple terms, this means delivering the best possible combination of quality, technical capability and cost/price. At the end of the procurement process, you’ll go away with the confidence that you achieved the best result possible, which normally means you have:
- Identified a clear winner of the competition – a good separation in final scores gives confidence that the outcome is correct and reduces the likelihood of any challenges
- Ended up with the solution that you set out to achieve – i.e. a high quality (and therefore high cost) solution; or a just compliant, low cost solution; or somewhere in the middle – a good quality solution for a reasonable cost
And as Richard Malin highlights in his quote above, your decision making, from the outset right up to the achievement of these desired results, will be fully transparent with a clear and robust audit trail. This leads us onto point number 4…
4. You can defend your decision
It’s about navigating the supplier engagement and evaluation processes with fairness, openness and transparency, and that’s incredibly important for public funded procurements in particular.
Drew Schlosser, Senior Procurement Consultant, North America
Whatever the size and complexity of your procurement, you’ll need to navigate your supplier engagement and evaluation processes with fairness, openness and transparency to protect you against any unnecessary risks. This means having a clear and detailed audit trail of how and why the winning tender was selected; providing evidence of the decisions you make at every stage, from the design of the evaluation process through to the award of the contract.
The good news is that as it’s part of the AWARD® functionality, we ensure you have an accurate real-time audit trail so you can be confident that your decisions won’t be successfully challenged, helping you avoid increased costs and lengthy delays. With controlled access and the ability to record all competition data within AWARD®, your best possible outcome will include having clear visibility of the entire process so you can confidently and efficiently select the best supplier for your project.
5. We’ve supported you every step of the way!
We recognise that every customer is unique – it’s therefore essential to have a flexible approach, agree on your outcomes right from the start and provide a positive experience in delivering these.
Elona Hanner, Customer Success Manager, APAC
Commerce Decisions’ aim is not only to meet, but to exceed, our customers’ expectations, we’re always looking for smarter ways to drive better outcomes, continually innovating our technology and evolving our consulting solutions.
Working in a collaborative partnership with our clients right from the start allows us to provide an effective, efficient structured process throughout the critical stages of complex procurement. By providing the right mix of solutions and expertise you need, we help you to reach your project or programme goals sooner, more cost effectively and with reduced risk, ensuring you achieve the best possible outcome.
Our AWARD® Pro, Plus and Premium packages offer a mix of services, software and training, allowing us to provide 360-degree support, tailored to your individual project requirements.
What’s evident from the wide variety of views across the team, is that we ensure best possible outcomes in many ways: from delivering value for money to protecting decisions and limiting risk. What each of the above definitions have in common however, is the importance of ensuring the end result meet the needs of your team, and ultimately the end users of the product, service or solution being procured.
About AWARD®
Whether you’re looking to shorten time to contract, improve value for money, or reduce risk, our AWARD® solution can make a real difference to the successful outcome of your project.
For 6 top tips from our expert team on how to deliver best possible outcomes on your next project, take a look at our free guide here.
