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Is the Road Ahead Clear?

“In 2015, the Highways Agency became Highways England. This means that it’s a government owned strategic highways company and capital expenditure is structured through programmes of work and procurement and allocation of work can be planned in advance.
The collaborative delivery framework (CDF) means that the supply chain can make use of a bespoke contract based on collaborative partnering with target costs and pain gain approach. These are also incentivised targets for continuous improvements on performance on time, cost, and quality with a drive to increase efficiency.

Most successful projects in today’s world rely on collaboration between all parties on a project. We are seeing that increasingly, our customers are pushing for this and for this to happen right at the conception stage of projects. They are also looking for collaboration to last long- i.e. well beyond the completion of projects. For this to work it has to be effective collaboration, not just lip service.

Right first time
The one team approach where collaboration can shine is the right first time approach, which means that all the contributions and skills of supply chain deliver best value for money and optimise output. A collaborative framework gives a future of the collaborative vision to the supply chain, to utilise its resources as well as providing an example of what true collaboration can achieve.

Risky Business
If a job requires a million tonnes of tarmac, there are very few suppliers who can give that. Lots of people tendering will want to use that supplier. From the suppliers point of view- there is minimal risk, if everyone is given the same price. The supplier doesn’t mind who wins, whoever wins- he gets the job. In a collaborative framework, our supplier would need to come in with us, right at the beginning of the tender stage.

Collaboration at Conception Stage
Collaboration needs to start before we start tendering, allowing us to understand the risks right up front. When tendering, we need our Tier 1 Supply Chain to be our partners, this includes our specialists all lining up. They have to be involved at conception stage- as we need to bring partners with us.
So I guess the question we may ask ourselves is – how do we structure our tender bids in a collaborative framework?”

Mike Todd is the Lead Business Development Manager for Infrastructure at Osborne.

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