Research and Insights

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Research Summary*

Current research carried out into past tendering activities highlighted the need for SMEs to be trained and made tender ready.

This past research showed that small firms were unable to access public sector contracts due to:

• Ignorance about tendering opportunities
• Perceiving the tendering process to be too complex for them
• Existing contracts are sometimes too large for small businesses
• Inadequate skills and capacity to fulfil tendering requirements

Despite these perceived difficulties, SMEs provide a unique, competitive advantage to the buyer, for instance:

• There are better levels of service when dealing with an SME
• SME's possess innovative business solutions
• There is increased competitiveness through best value offering, due to lower overheads
• The short management chain means increased speed in decision making and action taking
• Specialisation- small businesses can offer specialist cost effective services that larger organisations may find too tedious to engage in.
• The quality of service provided by an SME to a large supplier is high due to the fact that the supplier is a very highly valued customer

The challenges SME's face in accessing public sector contracts and the means for overcoming these are the main platform for the Tender to Win programme.

This programme is therefore designed to help 'you' the SME, engage with public sector buyers and benefit from lucrative contracts.

*Summary of research conducted by the Office of Government Commerce OGC