Having spent long enough inside the procurement system, I've come to understand where it falls short – for bidders and buyers alike.
What should be a fair, transparent gateway to commercial growth can become an exhausting box-ticking exercise. The system can lose sight of what procurement should fundamentally be about: trust, reliability, commitment, a fair balance of quality and cost, and a genuine ability to respond to client needs.
To be clear, we win our fair share of work, and have come across procurement processes that get this balance right. It's the exceptions that prompted this piece.
For an SME, every hour spent working through tendering guidelines is an hour when it’s not delivering for clients. Unlike national corporations, it won’t necessarily have a procurement specialist or bidding department, and for some SMEs the process is enough to put them off bidding altogether. That means the end client could be missing out on the business best placed to serve them.
We've felt this most in how the system evaluates ‘value’. Tender documents claim to balance quality and cost, but in our recent experience the weighting tells a different story: in many tenders, cost scoring is as high as 60% or 70%. We regularly score well on service and on the requirements that sit behind it: health and safety, delivery, environmental considerations and responsible employer status, and we still lose on price. Quality can end up as a secondary baseline rather than a defining metric.
There's a particular frustration in this for a company like ours. We hear regularly about the importance of local suppliers and the circular economy, yet when tenders are actually scored, that thinking can fall away and rarely translates into meaningful weighting. A national contractor may employ local staff, but with an SME like ours, the whole business, ownership, decisions, and profit, stays local rather than being drawn out of the community.
As a small business, we cannot leverage suppliers the way a national contractor can. Paying the Real Living Wage costs more, and it should, but it puts us at a disadvantage against bidders who don't. Our approach to sanitary waste disposal, using Energy from Waste rather than the cheapest route to landfill, costs more in both disposal and transport. Every one of these is a responsible choice. Under the current scoring, each can also be a competitive disadvantage.
The consequences of a price-led decision are fairly predictable. Once the contract is awarded, the low-cost winner may look to claw back the missing margin. Service levels drop, communication breaks down and the commitment promised at tender stage quietly fades. By the time the client realises the service isn't what was expected, the contract is locked in.
There's a structural gap worth raising here too. Procurement teams are, understandably, measured on cost savings. However, in our experience it's the department actually receiving the service that deals with the fallout when a low-cost supplier fails to deliver. We're not laying that at the door of individual procurement officers, who are simply working to their set remit and targets. When a contract goes wrong, however, it’s still fair to ask: does the procurement process carry any of the consequences, or do these costs land entirely on the department left to manage it?
This is a widely shared complaint. The Scottish Government's Public Procurement: Survey of Suppliers 2024 highlights how suppliers can struggle to get actionable feedback and meaningful communication from procurement bodies. In many cases, the system rewards corporate compliance over local excellence, squeezing out independent businesses that care most about quality and long-term client relationships.
This isn't theoretical for us. We have lost major bids, and it stings. The procurement officer properly followed the process as required, but in principle it’s still a methodology that can leave facilities managers, who may not have been sufficiently involved in the decision-making process, dealing with a contractor working to margins that were never realistic.
That's just business, perhaps, but what actually happens when services like hygiene and waste disposal are treated as commodities to be bought at the lowest price? In high-traffic environments used daily by perhaps thousands of people, the consequences quickly materialise. A contractor squeezed on margin might be tempted to cut corners: missed collections, overflowing bins, empty soap dispensers. Washrooms can become a health hazard rather than a baseline expectation, and facilities teams end up managing a steady stream of complaints instead of running a viable service. Savings on paper rarely stay saved. It tends to resurface later as operational disruption, health risk and reputational cost.
For one client, we built a genuinely sustainable solution: a single dedicated local operative who travelled by bus once a week and covered nearly 60 sites on foot. Waste was properly secured at designated locations, stored, then collected once a month monthly by our waste team and taken to a local Energy from Waste facility. It supported a local job, reduced the carbon footprint and kept the value in the community it served. Under procurement rules like these, that solution may not have received the credit it deserved.
National players can win on price, tick the compliance boxes on paper, and the reality on the ground could turn out very different.
This is a familiar issue for SMEs, and it points to where a fix might start: with the scoring itself, helping procurement teams achieve the best overall value they are seeking. Give quality, reliability and social value a weighting that matches their stated importance in tender documents, rather than treating them as a tie-breaker once price has done the heavy lifting. Build in a mechanism for post-contract accountability, so a supplier that under-delivers after winning on price answers for it. And scale the paperwork to the size of the opportunity: lower-value contracts shouldn't demand the same process as a nine-figure framework. More SMEs would be able to compete for contracts that genuinely suit them.
Until buyers weigh trust, reliability and community impact as heavily as a spreadsheet projection, organisations will keep learning the hard way that the cheapest contract on paper could come at a higher long-term cost.
We know we're not alone in this. We've connected with other SMEs who have lost out on price alone and recognise the same frustration. Good local companies want to do well by their clients, employ local people and stay invested in their communities for the long term.
To us, a client is never just another number. Procurement done well recognises that too. It looks past the figure on the page to the business behind it.