Do you work in facilities management (FM)? Did you know that FM is a service that is regularly outsourced within the public sector?
As such, facilities management contracts provide a great opportunity for your business, providing a regular source of business, revenue, and the opportunity to grow.
In this blog, our team of tender writers share their top tips when writing your tender response!
Top tips to help you win facilities management contracts
1. Be sure to read all of the tender documentation
There may be a lot of documentation for your facilities management contract, but you need to understand exactly what the buyer is looking for and whether you are able to meet all their requirements, so ensure you go through all the documents thoroughly. You don’t want to invest your time and resource to get part way through and realise you cannot meet some of the buyer’s requirements.
2. Take the opportunity to visit the site
Sometimes this will be suggested in the tender documentation but even if it’s not, you should try and arrange a site visit. Visiting the site will allow you to be very specific in your response and you may also see an opportunity to add value and enhance your response. You may also get the opportunity to ask the team on site questions.
3. Demonstrate robust contract management processes
When you win your facilities management contracts, there will be regular communication between yourself and the buyer. It is crucial that in your tender response, you demonstrate your robust contract management processes. You will need to provide a clear organisational structure and corresponding lines of communication.
4. Show how you will increase efficiencies and demonstrate value for money
Buyers outsource facilities management contracts in order to reduce costs and increase efficiencies, so it is key for you to demonstrate how you will do this. Are you able to share facts and figures from what you have done in the past? Are you able to apply a proven past efficiency to this contract?
5. Be clear on your environmental commitments
You will need to share your environmental policies and procedures, and provide evidence to support your commitments so be clear in your own mind about what your business can and will deliver. The best responses will consider how this commitment will then help the buying organisation with their own environmental program. So, try to calculate specifically the environmental impacts of your service on the buyer – e.g. how much less waste will go to landfill?
6. Make sure your Health & Safety Policy is up to date
Buyers need to be confident that all services will be carried out to the highest Health & Safety standards with minimal risk to your employees, their employees and the general public. They are risk averse so you need to demonstrate that you have the appropriate Health and Safety policies in place. Don’t forget that you will also need to expand on this and share staff training and qualifications in Health & Safety.
7. Share your quality control processes and any associated accreditation.
You will need to detail what systems and processes you have in place around quality control and share any quality assurance accreditation you have. You may also be asked about how you monitor your service delivery and deal with any problems and customer feedback.
8. Don’t forget to show you are thinking about continuous improvement
Many tenders will ask suppliers to demonstrate what they can do to enhance the contract. Do you have any innovative ideas you can bring to the table? What else can you do to go beyond just delivering the contract? Make sure you can document this.
Our team of senior tender writing consultants have extensive experience in winning facilities management contracts and can supply your business with everything it needs to prepare an outstanding facilities management tender response.
Find out more about our tender writing services and get in touch to discuss how we can support you.
