Client story: Accenture
Learn how BidCraft helped Accenture secure a place on the Crown Commercial Service’s Framework Agreement RM6335 for IT Digital and Legacy Application Services (DALAS).
Information technology services and consulting
Accenture has 750,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries
From February 2023
Accenture plc is a global multinational professional services company originating in the US and headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, that specializes in information technology services and consulting. A Fortune Global 500 company, it reported revenues of $64.9 billion in 2024.
- BidEdge: Evaluation and scoring
- BidSkills: Bid training
DALAS in numbers
About DALAS
Crown Commercial Service (CCS), working with HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), has procured a new Framework Agreement for IT Digital and Legacy Application Services (DALAS).
The DALAS framework will provide a strategic gateway to support the delivery of future application services and move HMRC toward an application services support model that is less dependent upon legacy technologies and incumbent suppliers.
The framework will also be available to be used by Central Government Departments and all other UK Public Sector Bodies, including Local Authorities, Health, Police, Fire and Rescue, Education and Devolved Administrations.
The Lots we helped Accenture win a place on:
- Lot 1: Value Realisation and Design Services
- Lot 2a: Digital, Integration and Programme Application Services (large scale)
- Lot 3: Application and Integration Run Services
- Lot 4a: Multi Product Configuration Services
A critical friend
With numbers like these, nobody wants to miss out on the action. Yet DALAS was not an easy framework to win a place on. You only have to see who’s NOT a supplier to appreciate this. Furthermore, the MEAT ratio of 75:25 pointed to a focus on technical capability and quality over price, so to be successful you’d need to be at the top of your game with high-quality and high-scoring bids.
Having worked with Accenture on other deals, our reputation for being experts in public sector tenders, CCS frameworks, and evaluating proposals had spread. We know that every mark counts – and how to earn them. Not wanting to leave anything to chance, we got The Call.
Where the magic happens
Our first task was to dig into the tender documents and the evaluation criteria. We do what the customer evaluation team does, before they get a look-in. We break the criteria down into its singular parts and use it to build a score tracker that guides the team on what they’re hitting in real time and how they can improve their scores. An intuitive dashboard lets the team see the ‘scores on the doors’ on every checkpoint call so they see the progress being made and where to prioritise. No more ‘fingers-crossed-eyes-closed-press-submit’.
We then set about providing constructive feedback in the responses themselves. Our methodology entails us looking for clarity of message, risk, evidence, and win themes — the ‘so what’, ‘yes but’, ‘prove it’, and ‘why you’ to ensure the proposal is joined-up and compelling.
We add detailed and constructive comments in the response files, and we talk to the owners to explain our feedback. We find this helps them understand where we’re coming from and leaves them better equipped to action the feedback. It also helps us understand more about why they wrote what they did.
Helping Accenture to help themselves
These conversations with content owners obviously made an impression as we were asked to train the team in the art of bidding. With this in mind, we created a bespoke training day that broke down the entire bid process from capture planning, bid writing, to submission, and even to the evaluator and their mindset when reading a proposal.
The training day was a complete mix of us training on bidding, reviewing, evaluating, and getting the team to complete tasks in isolation and in groups. The varied tasks involved them taking themselves out of their usual position of writing or reviewing a bid, to putting themselves into the shoes of an evaluator, to storyboard in different ways that capture what the buyer is really looking for, and to present a solution that gets the buy in of the team.
The hard work starts here
Winning a place on the framework was just the beginning. We were soon invited back to support two concurrent call-off contracts (one valued at £271,000,000 and the other at £305,690,000) by forensically evaluating and scoring each of them.
Winning both call-offs has positioned Accenture as a major supplier of large scale digital, integration and development new build services, and professional services to HMRC with a 42% share of spend to date under the framework. And this is just the beginning.
Commenting on LinkedIn on 22 September 2023, Hacer Evans (Managing Director at Accenture) said:
“I’m so proud of the team who put together the winning DALAS bid, and its testament to quality, collaboration and innovation that Accenture and our partners bring to delivery every day.”
Continuing the relationship
Looking ahead, we’re continuing to support Accenture on key strategic deals across the business and we continue to leave our mark wherever we go.