Case studies
Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS) NHS Trust provides emergency, urgent care and non-emergency patient transport services across the Yorkshire region. Impart was recommended to YAS’ Managing Director of PTS, Chris Dexter, by a fellow Director who had attended our best practice bid writing training at another Trust.
YAS had been unsuccessful in their bid to retain a PTS contract in Hull and felt a new approach was required for upcoming tenders. Impart reviewed their unsuccessful bid and provided detailed feedback on their submission, identifying areas of improvement and demonstrating the value we could add.
Since then we have delivered a number of training courses to their in-house bid team and subject matter experts and supported them on numerous (6) successful bids for patient transport and Integrated Urgent Care/NHS111 services, including helping them regain the Hull PTS contract when it came back out to tender in 2019.
YAS’ success is due, in no small part, to the implementation of our best practice bid methodology. We have worked in partnership with their in-house bid team to build their skills and support them in becoming increasingly self-sufficient whilst following our processes, leading to the creation of compelling and high-scoring submissions.
Following the release of a significant tender opportunity to provide residential broadband and supporting services, we were introduced to the TalkTalk Business team through a client who provides a range of professional services to them.
Given the size, complexity and transformational nature (for both residents/customers and TalkTalk’s business) of the opportunity, we were commissioned to support them and their in-house team with the bid process across four lots, with each one covering different aspects of the technical solution and associated service. This required a significant amount of detailed content to ensure each response was high-quality, well-structured, compelling to read and as high scoring as possible.
We provided both on and off-site support to the TalkTalk Business team, reviewing and editing their draft content and offering guidance on how to maximise the quality and score of their responses. During each stage of the procurement, the team supported TalkTalk Business, working tirelessly to ensure every submission was of the highest quality.
TalkTalk Business Managing Director - Indirect, commented on how clearly their proposition had been articulated within the submissions, and how easy to read and compelling the responses were. Our dedication helped TalkTalk Business secure all four lots, in a contract worth circa £800 million.
As with all new customers, when we first engaged with Leeds City Council (LCC) we offered to review and provide feedback on their recent grant applications to central government. Through this detailed review we identified a number of areas of improvement, including the answer structure, the use of evidence/examples and the clear articulation of benefits.
We subsequently supported the Yorkshire and Humber’s (including all the local authorities and NHS Trusts within the region) bid for Local Health and Care Record Exemplar funding to support greater integration and sharing of patient data across the region. We worked closely with LCC and the other key stakeholders to produce, review and improve the submission, ensuring the response addressed all the requirements/criteria, and was as high scoring as possible. The region was subsequently awarded one of the five first wave pilots and received multimillion-pound funding to support the development of the Yorkshire and Humber Care Record, which was a huge success for the region.
Through our extensive experience of tendering and reviewing submissions from an evaluator’s perspective, we have supported a recent procurement including the development of the specification, evaluation criteria and quality questions, and participated in the subsequent evaluation of bidders’ responses.
Logicalis UK is a leading provider of global IT solutions and managed services, and has strategic partnerships with Cisco and IBM, to name but a few. Whilst Logicalis had invested significantly in their pro-active business development activity, they weren’t realising the level of tender success they would expect from such an approach. They therefore asked us to undertake an independent assessment of their bid process and tender responses.
We identified a number of ways to improve the quality of their submissions and produced a detailed report focusing on how to maximise the value they receive from the bid management process. As part of this, a training programme was rolled out over a six-month period to 80+ people, who provided exceptional feedback, with delegates stating the “Course was of a high standard and well presented”, and it “Gave me a new and fresh approach to responses”.
We have since become Logicalis’ full-time bid management team, providing a very flexible service model to cater for the “peaks and troughs” nature of tendering. During busy periods we increase our capacity to ensure their business functions receive exceptional support and, when it’s quiet, they accumulate days to support those busier periods.
Over the last twelve months Logicalis has won six of the seven significant opportunities we have supported them on. This includes becoming the top Cisco provider on the higher education JISC framework and winning a strategic and high-profile Wi-Fi / Video Conferencing contract, where they were complimented on the quality of the submission.
In addition to supporting Logicalis with their bid management process, we identify new public sector opportunities for them and maintain a bid library of high-quality responses that can be utilised in future bids.
After presenting at TalkTalk’s Manchester Partner Roadshow in February, where we shared insights into how to craft winning bids, we met the Vaioni team who were interested in how we could support them on future opportunities. Vaioni delivers connectivity, voice and network security services across the UK and, through its own Ethernet Network, provides one of the fastest and most reliable networks in the UK, with guaranteed uptime of 99.999% and industry-leading SLAs. The team has exciting growth plans over the next four years, with ambitions to become the leading-edge innovator in the UK connectivity market.
When a framework opportunity was published a few months later, Vaioni reached out for our support as it would be their first tendering experience and they wanted to ensure they got it right. With only a couple of weeks to the submission deadline, we had to collaborate closely and effectively to produce a response that was as compelling and high scoring as possible.
We scheduled an urgent kick-off call with the stakeholders to explain our process in more detail and how we would manage the bid and work together, and produced Answer Guidance Templates for all the scored answers to support their subject matter experts in the development of their responses. We also assisted them in using the portal and completing the SQ, utilising our knowledge to make the process as quick and easy as possible.
It took a few late nights and weekend working, however we managed to condense our iterative review process into a week and a half. We worked alongside Vaioni’s subject matter experts to aid their understanding of how to write high scoring responses, which resulted in transforming a first draft of circa 15,000 words into a detailed, high quality submission of circa 32,000 words. Vaioni’s Managing Director stated our hard work and guidance was “invaluable”, and the team was appreciative of the swift turnaround of our reviews, which meant the final response could be submitted before the deadline.
Subsequently, Vaioni get onto the three lots they had bid for, with quality scores of 97%, 94% and 97% - a testament to the strength of our process.
Wessex Archaeology is a leading UK provider of heritage and archaeological services, and is an educational charity. It has undertaken works around the Stonehenge World Heritage Site for the past 40 years and the release of a tender by Highways England to undertake Archaeological Works for the A303 Amesbury to Berwick Down (Stonehenge) Project was a significant opportunity.
Given the importance of the project to Wessex Archaeology, they engaged Impart to manage the bid process and ensure they had the best possible chance of producing a high-scoring and compelling tender response. This would be a long-term project that would ensure they could continue their work of managing and interpreting the site and landscape, and engaging a diverse audience with our shared heritage.
The quality questions were challenging due to the very tight page limits and the complex and multi-faceted evaluation criteria. However, due to our best practice process, we were able to provide a clear response structure for all of the questions, making it easier for Wessex Archaeology’s subject matter experts to write their answers.
During our iterative review process and subsequent Red Team Review, we worked collaboratively to craft the tender response into as high scoring and compelling document as possible. Our best practice process proved invaluable as Wessex Archaeology was awarded this strategic and high-profile £35m contract in October 2020.
MIAA specialises in delivering internal audit and counter fraud services to public-sector organisations across the UK, and is the largest provider of these services in the North West of England. Even though it was delivering very successful services for many clients, it was keen to further improve its tender and framework contract success. Therefore, a key driver of seeking a bid consultancy’s support was to make its written content more compelling and high scoring.
After hearing about Impart’s best practice bid management process, MIAA felt that the iterative review process would help enhance the quality of its responses and enable it to be more competitive. Impart has now worked alongside MIAA on 7 bids, and also created a bid library for the organisation, enabling it to access high-quality previous content as a starting point for new tenders, saving time. MIAA’s subject matter experts have also embraced our iterative review process, becoming more upskilled in our best practice approach during each tender, which has enabled the production of better responses first time, therefore reducing the amount of support they need and costs incurred.
Not only has the team become better at bidding and has an excellent library of content to call on, they have also been successful with all of the opportunities that Impart has supported them on. We hope that this winning partnership will continue for many years to come.
Following the re-release of a highways single supplier framework for Coventry City Council, HTM engaged Impart to support the production of a high-scoring and compelling tender response. With less than two weeks until submission, we mobilised immediately, ensuring HTM’s subject matter experts (SMEs) had our Answer Guidance Templates with 24 hours, enabling them to quickly draft strong first drafts.
Within a few days, the first drafts started to land in our inbox. Given the submission date was fast approaching, they were reviewed and returned within a day, giving the authors as much time as possible to action our feedback and provide second drafts for review, which helped to further strengthen the responses before submission. We provided the likely score of each iteration, giving the SMEs clear guidance on what needed to be done to improve the score. During the final week, we undertook content reduction to get the responses into the Council’s page limits, and had regular calls to discuss progress. This robust approach enabled HTM to submit a strong response before the deadline.
Our focus, tenacity, flexibility and fast mobilisation supported HTM to win the contract with an exceptional score of 95%.