Procurement Consulting Editing and Proofreading Services

Buyers get the prices their documents deserve. A requirement written loosely produces bids that are not comparable, priced with contingency, and caveated in ways that surface as variations the moment the contract starts. The supplier is not being difficult; they are pricing uncertainty, because uncertainty is what they were sent. Most of the money lost in procurement is lost at the drafting stage, months before anyone negotiates.

We edit what procurement consultancies and sourcing teams produce — requirement and specification documents, invitations to tender and requests for proposal, output and outcome-based specifications, pricing schedules and cost models for bidders, supplier questionnaires and qualification documents, category strategies and sourcing plans, contract and service level schedules, supplier performance frameworks and KPI definitions, negotiation briefs and mandate documents, spend analysis and opportunity assessments, supplier relationship management documentation, and policy and process documentation for internal buying teams. Our editors work on the document suppliers price against.

Writing the requirement so suppliers can price it accurately is the whole discipline, and the failure is nearly always the same: describing what the buyer wants in a general way and leaving the quantities, conditions and exceptions to be discovered. A specification saying "the supplier shall provide responsive support" will be priced by one bidder as business hours and another as around the clock, and the two bids cannot be compared. We work through these so every requirement carries the quantity, frequency and condition attached to it; so volumes are given with their historical range and their seasonality rather than as an annual average, because average volumes hide the peaks that drive cost; so the pricing schedule is structured so that identical work appears in the same line for every bidder, since comparability is created by the buyer and not by the market; so assumptions the supplier must not make are stated, along with what the buyer will and will not provide; so anything genuinely uncertain is priced as an option or a rate rather than folded into a lump sum a supplier must hedge; and so the requirement says what outcome is being bought rather than the method, wherever the buyer has no reason to specify the method. Suppliers respond to documents like this with lower prices and fewer caveats, which is the entire objective.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including specifications, pricing and supplier information. We are editors rather than procurement, commercial or legal advisers, and we offer no view on sourcing strategy, specifications or supplier selection. What we can do is remove the ambiguity that suppliers are currently charging you for.