The Procurement Act 2023 came into force earlier this year. One intent behind the Act is to make procurement for rail projects more flexible and open to smaller businesses. This raises a significant and telling question for smaller rail contractors: are we ready to step up?
Greater visibility over contract pipelines and simpler tendering processes are welcome steps forward. The changes will limit the costs of bidding, which can be a major overhead for a business like ours. But these changes won’t, on their own, transform procurement practice or project outcomes.
Delivering a Difference
For smaller contractors to benefit – we need to examine and be ready to deliver the underlying aims of the Act. What difference is it supposed to make?
Simpler and more inclusive procurement is a means, not an end. The end goal is to bring more innovation, agility and value into contract delivery. A larger number of smaller contracts delivering more or less what a smaller number of large contacts would have done doesn’t deliver greater value.
Additionally, risk management is a vital element in every project. Procurement teams will want to be confident that genuine points of difference in terms of responsiveness and creativity are backed by a track record of delivering promises. For example, Suttle Projects delivered 98% of projects with zero non-conformance issues.
Rapid Deployment, Smarter Solutions
Responsiveness and creativity represent the landscape we operate in. Shorter lines of communication and self-delivery capabilities aren’t just theoretically good things, we’ve demonstrated over many projects how they deliver faster decisions, rapid deployment of resources and a more direct link between onsite teams and the people designing technical solutions. This encapsulates our projects: simplified philosophy.
The working environment is a fertile one for identifying and resolving potential technical and design problems early in the process, and for exploring different approaches that can deliver more efficient and resilient solutions. This is fully in-tune with the intention of the Procurement Act.
You can get a flavour of the civil engineering work we deliver for the rail industry from the Projects section of our website. Or, to find out more about our projects: simplified approach to delivering project certainty, sign up to our information and insights section below.
