Carys Griffiths, senior procurement business partner in the Commercial Procurement Unit, explains how her team has set about improving the council’s procurement process for suppliers…
One of the ambitions within Liverpool City Council’s new Sustainable Procurement Strategy is to create a more accessible and inclusive procurement environment for suppliers. Making sure that businesses of all sizes and backgrounds have the opportunity to compete for our contracts, with a particular focus on making procurement more accessible to local suppliers.
To support this ambition, we have recently refreshed our supplier-facing procurement webpages.
Working with the council’s digital team, we started by reviewing the existing pages. We focused on making information easier to find, easier to understand and more accessible, particularly for SMEs, social enterprises, voluntary and community organisations, and suppliers who may be new to public sector procurement.
The Procurement and Contracts section now includes eight dedicated webpages covering topics such as finding opportunities and procurement guidance, alongside new pages on social value at the council and guidance and videos on using our contract management system.
Our aim has been simple – to help suppliers find the information they need, all in one place. Ultimately, making procurement easier to understand is about removing unnecessary barriers and making it simpler for more suppliers to do business with the council.
Early signs have been encouraging. Page clicks are showing increased visits to all pages with visitors accessing a wider range of content than previously.
And, for anyone familiar with the old pages, you may also notice they’ve had a bit of a makeover; we’ve swapped the grey for blue!
We want to keep improving, so we welcome feedback and suggestions from suppliers.
