Around €8 billion in Irish government tenders will be won by overseas companies unless local companies up their game, according to Peter Brennan, co-author of Public Procurement: Rules of the Road and chair of a company which manages public procurement bids.

Up for grabs over the next five years will be €90 billion in contracts for supplies, services and works to be procured in Ireland and Northern Ireland, but Brennan says that as much as 11% of this could be won by overseas companies, simply because indigenous companies do not tender either aggressively or professionally enough.

According to Brennan: “Irish SMEs badly to need to upskill to prevent non-Irish companies getting a significant share of the Irish procurement market. Irish companies have no automatic right to win government contracts and in too many instances that we have seen, indigenous companies have lost out because of the poor quality of their tenders.

“What we call ‘leakage’ of procurement contracts to firms in other EU states is normally under 2%. However, in Ireland the leakage rate is 11% — far too high. We need to reverse the trend of transferring a significant proportion of government expenditure outside the state, with a resulting loss in Exchequer revenue and jobs.”

Brennan’s company, Bid Management Services, carried out a survey of its clients to gather precise information on what happens during the process. Key findings were:

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• Nearly 90% of companies have a win rate of less than one in four
• 75% of tenders won were valued at less than €100,000; so-called low value contracts
• The two main barriers to tendering are public bodies’ resistance to providing a de-briefing, and badly defined technical specifications.

Public Procurement: Rules of the Road  aims to reverse this state of affairs by informing businesses about how public procurement works and the essential elements required for a successful bid.

It provides, for example, details about the Office of Government Procurement, NI’s Central Procurement Directorate, key sources of information and a description of the procurement market on the island of Ireland.

It covers procurement rules, including the implementation of the 2014 Procurement Directives and issues such as framework agreements, how best to form bid consortiums, and works contracts.

It also details how to develop a winning bid strategy, including pricing options, and explains how bids are marked and how tender competitions should be managed, and it contains advice about writing in a compelling manner to win bids and how to produce and submit a bid response to the highest quality standard.

Joanne Gillen, CEO of Bid Management Services and co-author of the book, said: “Having trained thousands of companies in the art of tendering and having won over €1 billion in contracts for our clients, we know there is a huge demand for professional training to help SMEs win more tenders.

“In response we are launching our Tender Training Excellence e-Learning Programme. This nine module training series is unique in Ireland and will be available on our website free of charge.”

She added that the new online course will complement the material covered in the book, which is available from Amazon either as an e-book or printed copy.

Photo: Peter Brennan and Joanne Gillen