QinetiQ Commerce Decisions Services

Facilitating best value procurement decisions

A procurement project is a series of high-stake decisions. The project team faces choices between alternative procurement strategies, alternative contractors, alternative products and services, and alternative contracts.

Decisions are hard to make in a project's formative stages, yet are subject to intense scrutiny. Alternatives are hard to differentiate. Uncertainty, risk and complexity abound. Hindsight is not available. Making the right choices is essential if the project is to succeed; wrong choices are expensive and time consuming to unwind.

Making the best decision relies on properly evaluating the alternatives to determine which offers the best balance of value and risk. This is complicated as the evaluation necessarily involves many stakeholders, a wide range of factors, and supporting documents and has to be conducted within demanding timescales.

The decisive phases of major procurement projects do not happen every day, and conducting project critical evaluation tasks can be unfamiliar territory.

"Commerce Decisions are a very professional organization, and played a key role in helping us carry out a very successful competition. I was very impressed with the quality of their consultants, the value that the AWARD tool delivered, and the way they worked with us throughout the project."

Anne Holden MARS IPT Team Leader

QinetiQ Commerce Decisions has developed considerable expertise in solving these problems through our involvement in procurements of different sizes valued at over £50 billion. Uniquely, QinetiQ Commerce Decisions is completely focused on delivering best-practice advice, facilitation and execution for procurement evaluation and decision-making.

• Our consulting services provide the knowledge and experience to help you in all stages of the procurement life cycle.
• Our training services provide customers with an introduction to AWARD and its use in applying best-practice methodologies to support buyers and sellers in the procurement process.
• Our support department provides direct technical support to our customers.

"One of the real benefits to me was getting the experience of other tender selections from the professional services team at Commerce Decisions. They were involved right at the start of the project. I decided that we would gain maximum benefit from using not only the AWARD tool but also the total Commerce Decisions package."

Trevor Lawrence, Project Manager, MOD DCC IPT

A total solution

QinetiQ Commerce Decisions can combine professional services with the provision of a hosted software-based evaluation service. This provides immediate incremental value over traditional spreadsheet-based approaches, which are inaccessible and do not support efficient collaboration.