Analyse Your Business

The first step in bidding for public sector contracts (indeed all contracts) is to firstly understand your organisation and what you can offer. Analysing your Business should be looked at in conjunction with the next main station of Understand the Market.

Quickfire Guide

Some Things to Consider are:

your current contracts, including customer feedback and current performance
your strengths and weaknesses
current geographical coverage
do you provide fair work opportunities to your employees?
pricing structures
unique selling point(s) of your organisation
current sub-contracting undertaken, either by you or to you
current collaboration e.g. consortium, joint ventures, etc.
areas of development/expansion for your organisation in the future.

Analysing the above will help you to:

determine which parts of the public sector you are interested in
ensure you only bid for work that you can do
ensure you have the capability and capacity to deliver the contract you are considering to bid for e.g. the resources to deliver a large contract to the whole public sector
decide if you are better suited to a local or niche market
determine if you could you be a main contractor, or if being a sub-contractor or part of a consortium better suits your business
further determine who your current and potential future competitors are.

Benchmarking

It is a good idea to compare and evaluate yourself against the performance and pricing of other suppliers in the market, including your direct competitors.

This will provide information on:

the areas you are performing well in
the areas which require improvement
how other, similar organisations operate, including how they achieve their high performance.

Public Contracts Scotland Registration

You should register as a supplier on Public Contracts Scotland (PCS) by setting up a supplier profile to improve your visibility for lower value procurements.

More information on this can be found in the Public Contracts Scotland station.

Cyber Resilience

Some links to resources to help you analyse your cyber resilience can be found in the Support Available section.

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