Client story: Amey Secure Infrastructure
Facilities and Estate Management
Amey SI is a UK based part of the Amey Group and has revenues of over £1.1bn.
From February 2019
Amey Secure Infrastructure (SI) is a critical supplier of integrated facilities services to the public sector and UK defence.
- BidEdge: Bid strategies and pre-mortems
- BidEdge: Tactical support
- BidSkills: Bid training
- BidSkills: Bid playbook
- BidSkills: APMP certification
IQVIA in numbers
A chance meeting (or two)…
Business success is down to serendipity more often than anyone might care to admit. And at BidCraft we’ve had many a chance meeting evolve into something more.
We met leadership staff from Amey Secure Infrastructure (SI) through good old-fashioned networking. After crossing paths regularly at events and conferences over the years, we started to work together in February 2019, when an ideal opportunity presented itself.
We were brought in to develop a capture strategy to help Amey SI compete for the Ministry of Defence’s Future Maritime Support Programme (FMSP) tender. The opportunity was worth £732m over seven years and Amey SI recognised the value we’d bring to the process. Our Managing Director Jon Darby was engaged as Capture Lead, heading up a team of around 15 people.
For Jon and the team, this meant developing the capture strategy and preparing for the tender release, reporting to Amey SI’s Defence Steering Group throughout. We undertook months of research and planning, including customer stakeholder analysis, investigating supply chain viability, and competitor analysis. Following a pre-mortem, we led multiple win strategy and solution-shaping workshops to prepare the team. Our structured workshops ensured Amey SI’s staff helped shape the solutions within the capture strategy.
When the invitation to tender was eventually released, the Defence Steering Group was guided by our joint capture planning to determine whether it was worth pursuing a bid. In this case – thanks to our input – they decided against bidding.
Now, this may seem counterintuitive. A bidding services company recommending a client DOESN’T put forward a bid. But we’re all about integrity. Our clients trust us because of it. Based on our thorough capture analysis, Amey SI had doubts about the contract going anywhere but back to the incumbent – and so it proved. Without our capture strategy work, they could have ploughed effort, resources and money into a bid that was unlikely to bear fruit. And so it proved that by investing in capture strategy, they avoided diluting their overall bidding efforts.
The next steps
After cementing Amey SI’s trust in how we work and what we know, we were invited to deliver a training programme to staff. We created a Bidding Essentials course to cover every element of the bid process. We also designed subject-specific masterclasses on a range of bidding topics including how to develop win strategies. We adapted to online delivery due to Covid-19 and developed a suite of video lessons for their in-house eLearning platform. As well as on-demand content, we also led eight live ‘lunch and learn’ webinars to support staff’s learning journeys.
Inspired by the value participants got from the training, we launched our own BidCraft Academy. BidCraft now offers this unique eLearning Management System to deliver approved training for the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP).
Throughout lockdown Amey SI continued to work with us; they invited us to deliver our APMP certification courses to staff. To date we’ve taught 19 Amey SI staff with a 100% pass rate.
Evergreen impact
Having developed training and webinars for Amey SI, we developed a Bid Playbook containing insights, practical guidance, tips, and checklists. The Playbook covers 22 topics, making it super easy for the Amey SI team to find and use the right guidance, as and when they need it.
True consultancy should make change and leave the client able to move forward self-sufficiently. With the training courses and Bid Playbook, we’ve set Amey SI up to tackle any future bid with the skills, confidence, and tools to win.