Procurement of a new supplier for a WAN (Wide Area Network).
The National Education Union (NEU) is the largest education union in Europe, supporting and representing more than 450,000 members, including the majority of teachers.
The NEU provides CPD, publications and other resources to help educators to develop their skills and guide their students, as well as offering support and advice from a team of local experts if you face a problem at work.
The NEU wanted to ensure that their replacement WAN was procured in a transparent, fair and auditable process, ensuring best value for the organisation and its members.
Having not run a WAN procurement, or tender, for a considerable time, and with limited resources or market knowledge in-house, the NEU appointed eXceeding to assist.
eXceeding’s extremely current WAN tender marketplace knowledge ensured we knew the ideal bidders to engage, as well as ensuring that the resulting contract offered flexibility, but with clear SLAs and KPIs in place to protect the NEU.
We identified 3 key challenges which needed to be addressed as part of the project:
The NEU tasked eXceeding with saving money
Whilst getting a significantly increased capacity and highly resilient WAN that delivered a substantially future-proofed solution
Risk mitigation
It was essential to mitigate the risk of any downtime, or disruption of moving to a new provider
Flexible contract requirement
NEU required a flexible contract, with additional purchases added, which would have a coterminous contract end date
eXceeding worked with the NEU to design an appropriate and clear procurement process and detailed, documented specification of requirements and then embarked on taking the project to market. eXceeding’s procurement consultants took full ownership of the process including:
The NEU had a credible and capable supplier in place, and a contract which provided them with the flexibility the needed and the necessary SLAs in place to ensure the best possible service delivery.
eXceeding then helped benchmark and re-run the process 2½ years later, delivering even greater savings to the NEU with a simple yet very effective contract renegoation.
Kingsdale initially contracted eXceeding in 2015 and we went on to run multiple procurements in technology and building works.
SIPS initially engaged eXceeding back in 2015 after identifying risks which could potentially challenge the availability of critical services.
YMCA St Pauls appointed eXceeding to review multiple contracts they had in place to run 28 buildings. Our consultants conducted a strategic review, before working with YMCA to consolidate their suppliers, create consistent contracts and ensure firm SLAs and KPIs were in place to meet their specific needs.
