Supply25: super smart supply chain management fit for the twenty-first century!

Don’t you just love establishing your supply chain? Of course you don’t. Doing this can be one of the most miserable experiences possible, especially when tendering for contracts from large organisations, whether public or private. Not any more though – we’ve created Supply25 to transform how supplier assurance works in public sector procurement, replacing fragmented manual processes with a single, structured platform.

Across Scotland the public sector handles many thousands of procurements every year, from the simplest small product purchase through to huge, multifaceted, complex and complicated projects. The same applies in the private sector.

It’s vital these procurements are handled efficiently, securely and quickly. However, traditional processes can sometimes be complex and resource intensive, creating challenges for buying teams and making it harder for suppliers — particularly SMEs — to engage.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in supply chain management.

These supply chains must be assessed robustly but until now the systems used have been fragmented and inconsistent. And they’ve relied on manual tools like spreadsheets and emails and bespoke, one-off questionnaires for each and every procurement. Which means suppliers end up facing a complicated landscape of varying expectations, different documentation, and processes that can be difficult to navigate. And that means even for tenders which at first glance look identical, suppliers find themselves starting from scratch...

But not any longer, because Supply25 solves the problems.

Designed in collaboration with the Scottish Government, Supply25 brings structure, security, and intelligence to public sector procurement by enabling organisations to assess suppliers in a consistent, collaborative and transparent way — all while drawing on domain expertise in areas like Cyber Security and Accessibility.

By embedding these standards directly into workflows, Supply25 means organisations can evaluate suppliers against common benchmarks and give clear feedback, which in turn means suppliers can build their understanding of their potential clients and so improve their approach.

Now, both buyer and seller can work from a shared playbook – reducing repetition, improving clarity, and raising the bar for assurance. Not to mention creating massive efficiencies for the ever-busy procurement teams.

And implementing it across Scotland’s supply chains, we’re strengthening the delivery of public services for the people we serve. So much in fact, the Scottish Government is now supporting a national rollout of Supply25 to priority public sector organisations across Scotland.

The Supply25 platform developed in response to a Challenge posed by CivTech Scotland, and after emerging from the CivTech 9 Accelerator quickly validated its effectiveness, usability, flexibility and impact in a wide range of active procurement scenarios, including NHS Education Scotland, Transport Scotland, and local councils.

And value for money (VfM)? It’s still relatively early days but the return on investment for any organisation adopting the system will very likely be well in excess of 20 to 1. Too good to be true? We have a rigorous VfM calculation system. The value is consistent with many other CivTech products. And numbers do not lie…

The Lessons Learnt

• Brilliant communications count: the Challenge Sponsor and the Supply25 team worked extremely hard to develop and maintain good two-way information flow. Both groups listened, reflected and adapted extremely quickly in response to a demanding development schedule, which had a real bearing on the success of the project.

• Senior leader buy-in and support is vital if new products are to gain traction, and the earlier the better.

• Day One start-ups need a little extra help: while CivTech runs a comprehensive and highly-regarded business growth workshop system during the Accelerator, very early stage companies may well need a little more support as they go along. While we can’t always deliver this, we can signpost companies to the other great offerings in Scotland and make the necessary connections. It’s also why we’ve been hard at work on a radical new approach to start-up support.