Situation:
Barbara B Cooperativa Sociale is a Type B Social Cooperative with its registered office based in Italy, whose main goal is to provide employment opportunities for vulnerable and disadvantaged people in the Facilities sector. They were formed in 2007 and have strengthened their role as multi-service cooperative, providing greens maintenances, town cleaning, environmental hygiene services and cemetery and mortuary management. They contacted us in January 2019 having found us through online research. Their main goal was to research UK procurement and to expand internationally and break into the UK market.
Tasks/Challenges:
Barbara B Cooperativa Sociale receive multiple services from our company, having received assistance from both our Hudson Succeed and Hudson Procure team. In this, we are tasked with:
- Undergoing thorough and detailed procurement research within dedicated timescales. This includes liaising with councils across the UK and compiling research into detailed, informative reports.
- Developing high quality tender responses for Grounds Maintenance across the UK. This can prove difficult when extracting information/content for bids as a lot of this can be in Italian and therefore requires translation. This adds to the already difficult task of gathering information from a new client.
- As well as this, we are required to undergo bespoke opportunity tracking, utilising our procurement research to plan and prepare future tender proposals.
Activity:
The actions we have taken to ensure that high levels of customer satisfaction are constantly achieved are as follows:
- We developed a procurement research project which was distributed amongst our team, allowing us to collectively collate the required information to form our reports.
- We undergo detailed and thorough bid plands and outline what we will need from the client at the outset, ensuring that all content we are needing can be extracted and translated in time for submission. This includes setting clear expectations from the outset to ensure that the client understands what work is required from their end.
- We have developed and designed detailed and intuitive procurement reports which have allowed the client who is new to tendering in the UK, to understand how this works and what strategy they should take.
- We have underwent detailed industry specific research to ensure the tender responses we have developed have been specific, high-quality and accurately represent the client’s capabilities.
Results:
Specific results achieved under this project are as follows:
- Through our dedication to high quality content, we have successfully scored 97% on quality for our first submission, an outstanding score considering how early on in the agreement this was achieved, coupled with the difficulty of translating content.
- We have successfully developed good working rapport with representatives from Barbara B Cooperativa Sociale and have helped streamline their understanding and approach towards procurement un the UK.
- On our second tender submission we have been successful in securing Barbara B in delivering a 4-year contract on behalf of UK Hospital Trust, delivering their regular Grounds Maintenance at a total value of c.£350,000.
Fillippo Ensenki (Operations Manager) has stated: “The collaboration with Hudson has been interestingly fruitful for Barbara B as we were entering a new market and we needed more insight and somebody who would be able to help us in letting our long experience in the Italian market emerge in the UK tendering process. In Hudson we found very responsive and professional support, in particular given the difficulties of transferring/translating the value of our Italian Social Cooperative work into the bid writing process: language sometimes can be a limit but we found how flexibility and creativity helped Hudson to support our business.”
