Procurement has always mattered in ICT, and especially in the public sector, where spending public money carries a duty to achieve genuine value on every purchase.
Value, though, isn’t the same as the lowest price. A sound process weighs cost against the quality of the goods or service, so you end up with something that actually does the job.
As budgets have tightened, the pressure to secure value has grown, and so has the procurement rulebook. Running an exercise that meets the regulations, including advertising higher-value contracts on the central government platform, takes time and a degree of technical skill.
Whether or not it’s front of mind, every public sector body, schools and colleges included, works within a legal framework. Since 2025, that framework is the Procurement Act 2023 and the Procurement Regulations 2024, which govern almost all public sector procurement.
We can help. We’ve run procurements ranging from simple, unregulated tenders for goods such as PCs and laptops, through framework mini-competitions, to full regulated processes. We’ve used framework further-competition routes for everything from mobile phones to telephony and fully managed ICT services, and we’ve run full tenders using the competitive flexible procedure introduced by the Procurement Act which increasingly offers a better and more bespoke outcome.
We can also take a step back and review your contracts and budgets. Confirming you’re buying through the right route for each contract’s value, and building a forward plan so you know well in advance when each procurement is due, with time to spare to stay comfortably within the rules and keep costs in check.
Every procurement is different, but the experience of many successful exercises helps us pitch the process at the right level: robust, fair to suppliers, and built to deliver a cost-effective result.
Sometimes the question is simpler. You may have used the same supplier for a low-value service for years and just want to know whether there’s anything better out there, and what testing the market would involve. We can review your spending profile and advise where a market test is likely to be worthwhile.
As with all our services, we can do as much or as little as you need, from advising on the right method, or sense-checking documents produced in-house, through to running a fully managed procurement, whether through an existing framework or via the competitive flexible process on Find-a-Tender.
For ongoing service contracts, we can also handle the stages after award: onboarding the chosen supplier, holding them to the commitments they made, and setting up account reviews so they keep honouring them for the full term of the contract.
Please contact us to hear about how we can help and our successes with others.