Do You Have Any Idea What Your Consultants Are Doing?

Hand-on-heart: Can you swear that you’ve properly briefed consultants and paid only for what you’ve received?

Buying professional services is often accompanied by a host of reputational risk and budgetary pressures.  However, for the public sector, a new approach to professional services procurement is proving that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Public sector procurement continues to be a highly debated topic in the UK, against a backdrop of reduced budgets and high-profile failures, it seems clear there’s still a need for new and innovative approaches.

What needs to change? Well, traditional purchasing frameworks have long been pegged as a solution to the sector’s buying challenges. They promise fully compliant access to a range of suppliers with all the hard work that comes with the tender process done for you. However, as they often offer a limited pool of suppliers and a notable cooling-off period which can delay a project’s start date, frameworks can be a frustrating route to market for some.

It’s in the procurement of professional services where the frustrations of traditional routes to market are often most keenly felt. There’s often a lot at stake. As budgets shrink and requirements evolve, the need to access expert external advice, often at short notice, is crucial to the success of some projects.

Consultants are often appointed as trouble shooters; to advise and lead on new projects or even spearhead big organisational changes. Using such services can represent a significant investment for public bodies and the failure of high profile projects such as IT infrastructure demonstrates the reputational and budgetary risk that can occur if you don’t get it right. Control is a key success factor.

There’s a need for change and some public sector bodies have already embraced a different approach. It’s an innovation that, unusually, could see the public sector leading the private sector.

The NEPRO neutral vendor solution recognises and responds to these and other short falls of traditional frameworks. It helps procurement professionals gain that control, mitigate reputational risk, deliver on budgets and manage demand. It’s a fast solution for the procurement of professional services that offers a welcome alternative to traditional purchasing routes.

The NEPRO solution is based on outcomes – buyers pay only for results delivered, measured by pre-agreed project milestones. We’ve all heard stories of consultants hired by public sector organisations to work on a specific project for a significant fee, only for the provider to still be there long after the project has finished having been hijacked by another department. This approach puts an end to that, with both the buyer and supplier clear on what is needed, by when and at an agreed fee.

If there’s no robust focus outcomes or deliverables it’s easy to see how contractors can end up staying in departments long after project completion and be paid significantly beyond the original value of the project they were hired to support.

When speed is important, procurement professionals have the opportunity to cut red tape and realise the benefits of consultant-based projects in a third of the time it traditionally takes to procure professional services. While traditional procurement routes can take 100 days from initial request for information through to a consultant starting work on a new project, this approach can see consultants start work in an average of 30 days through direct contract awards and fully compliant mini competitions.

The starting point for any new project is to fully understand what the buyer needs and find the right supplier to fulfil the brief. All the complexities of supplier management are taken care of on behalf of the buyer, providing compliance, control and transparency of expenditure. NEPRO delivery partner Bloom then manages the project and assures delivery.

We’re proud to now be transforming the procurement of professional services across the UK, giving buyers more choice and more business opportunities to suppliers of all sizes. To put that in context, last year, the number of contracting authorities wanting to procure through Bloom almost doubled to 170, suggesting that the public sector is waking up to this faster and more effective way to procure the services of consultants.

By Rob Levene, executive director and co-founder, Bloom.

With its unique neutral vendor solution, Bloom offers buyers access to a vast community of over 4,000 suppliers across 19 categories and 240 sub-categories. This dynamic supplier marketplace drives choice and competition and with over 70% of projects delivered by SMEs, helps drive growth back in the local economy and supports social value agendas.