Procurement of safety-critical fire door inspection services with local SME.
A leading new university in the UK approached eXceeding for help to tender for fire safety services with a local SME organisation.
The university had neither the experience nor the resources to ensure the specification was correct, the solution within budget, and the resulting contract compliant. It also needed help to manage the supplier once any contract had been awarded.
eXceeding directed the entire project from start to finish, including conducting pre-market engagement, creating the specification and schedule of works, running the Open Procedure procurement process and SRM (Supplier Relationship Management).
The success of the project has enabled eXceeding to build a strong relationship with the university, and we are assisting them in fulfilling other procurement needs currently.
The safety of its students is a high priority for the university, especially where those students are on site at one of its campuses.
As part of its fire safety policy, the university was looking for an expert contractor to carry out regular inspections of the fire doors across its buildings and sites over a three-year period. Some inspections would be conducted yearly, while the most risk-critical doors – such as those to student accommodation flats, bedrooms, kitchens and electrical or other high-risk rooms – would be subject to review every six months.
Our customer wanted to work with an external procurement expert with prior experience in managing fire safety tenders and the resources to conduct the necessary process to the required standards. The university contacted eXceeding for help in contracting with and managing an experienced local SME supplier.
The university did not have the necessary experience or expertise to prepare the specification for a fire safety tender, or to ensure any result contract was compliant. A lack of internal resources meant the university would also require help to manage the project once it had commenced.
There was a clear desire to work with a local SME, but this needed to be balanced with ensuring the project remained within budget and within timescales.
eXceeding’s procurement experts carried out pre-market engagement with potential suppliers to gain the knowledge required to prepare the relevant specification and schedule of works for the invitation to tender. Our team liaised closely with the university during this process to ensure the schedule of works contained all the required criteria.
We found a local suppliers some of which had worked for the university before, we ran a PCR 2015 Open Procedure that was fully compliant and secured a contract with the successful bidder within budget.
eXceeding managed the entire project of delivering fire door inspection services to the university from start to finish.
By successfully negotiating a requested break clause within the schedule of works for inflation of materials, we established a great relationship with the supplier from the outset that helped us in subsequently managing that supplier and the project once contracts had been signed.
Through excellence in SRM, we built a partnership of mutual trust whereby any issues that arose during delivery or regarding payment were able to be quickly resolved.
The university benefited from the peace of mind that comes from gaining relevant external expertise on safety-critical matters at a price within budget.
This university sought eXceeding’s higher-level procurement expertise to deliver two large outsourcing contract procurements in IT and Facilities Management.
This further education provider approached eXceeding for help to re-contract directly with its incumbent supplier for specialist cleaning services.
Kingsdale initially contracted eXceeding in 2015 and we went on to run multiple procurements in technology and building works.
