General Questions

We come across this scenario quite often, especially when either financial regulations or simple best practice stipulate that a review is required even if you are 100% satisfied and you know that this will also add costs in terms of fees.

This is why we have specifically developed www.cateringtender.co.uk to allow you to achieve your goal of carrying out a best value review without at the same time incurring significant costs.

Straightforward. Take time with all stakeholders to fully understand your own objectives in the tender and decide whether these are realistic and achievable. It’s that old adage – if you don’t know where you’re going the route there is immaterial!

Take the time to create a vision of what future ideal catering services would look like.

Whilst there are many options that can be followed, the priority has to be to maximise the number of companies responding who can deliver on your individual objectives for the tender.

We not only hold a “live” register of all catering services providers, but through our years of experience we are able to offer support  to your decision making processes through our client references.

This being the case, we have great experience in understanding what will work best for you and your business. Whilst advertising in trade journals such as the Caterer and Hotelkeeper can seem the most obvious route, it can also prove to be expensive and dependent on individual circumstances there can be better value options that produce as good an end result.

For those in the public sector there will be laid down procedures that must be followed dependent on the details laid out in your financial regulations. These details will normally vary the procedures dependent on the value of the contract.

If you simply recycle documentation from either previous or colleague tenders we would highlight some key issues that you run the risk of not delivering:

This will not deliver your personal objectives – see our earlier one piece of advice!

This will not allow you to experience the gains from the catering marketplace that have developed since the time that documentation was last used.

If you could ensure great value for money by maximising the benefits and reducing any duplication in tasks by both yourselves and ourselves, wouldn’t this at the same time allow you to get on with the rest of your workload?

That is why we allow you to personalise the correct level of support for your business.

In-house catering, where staff are employed directly and not through a contract catering company is obviously something that clients look at under any review. We always advise clients to formalise the process based on the following rationale.

In-house catering is not something that should be taken on lightly or viewed through rose-tinted spectacles. There are responsibilities within this change that will impact either on the in-house catering team or if not handled effectively at this level then the management team will become involved.

By including the in-house catering proposal within a competitive catering tender process all the associated benefits and indeed risks can be clearly laid out in front of the decision makers. This ensures that the decision makers know all options available in the marketplace and can proceed on this basis.

TUPE (transfer of undertakings – protection of employment) is the legislation that must be adhered to for staff currently employed within your catering operation.

Essentially this means that at the point of transfer to a new employer all current employment benefits (rate of pay, holiday entitlement, sickness entitlement etc.) are protected.

Whilst pensions are currently outside of this many clients also seek to include this in the transfer process.

This can be particularly the case within the public sector where the issue is best dealt with by any new employer either having a GAD approved pension scheme or if that employer applies for admitted body status to the relevant Local Authority pension scheme.

There are obvious attractions to “bundle” what are effectively non-core activities (catering, cleaning etc.) into a single tender process. These are often also referred to as “soft services”.

As well as being attractive to you as a client this is similarly attractive to those service providers who have positioned themselves in the marketplace as facilities support/multi services providers.

The key in our approach is in selecting the correctly qualified organisations that have expertise in the various elements of the “bundle”. What needs to be avoided at all costs in these scenarios for example, are catering companies who think that because they clean the kitchen they are qualified to clean a whole building and vice versa!