We started off in 2009 as two guys who needed to make contacts with procurement officers in local authorities, public bodies and the public service in general.

Having scratched around for six months, making a load of phone calls, writing letters (the snail mail kind) and searching online, we finally had a list of sorts. It didn’t amount to more than maybe 150 names and contact details.

The frustrating thing was that we knew there were over 1,300 individual organisations plus about 400 local authorities. And because these were “public” it seemed an awful lot of work to obtain simple information that one thinks should be out there in the public domain already. But it wasn’t – at least not in any organised and easily accessible form.

Realising that there might be a real need for this information amongst suppliers, we decided to make it a dedicated project and build a complete database. With renewed and focused effort, we slowly but surely achieved that objective.

Then we turned our attention to actual contract details. If we were to help procurement professionals to save money on contract renewals, we had to enable them to easily find out what other public organisations were renewing similar contracts at the same time. That would enable cross-sector collaboration: joining forces to obtain better deals for combined high volume procurement.

It seemed like a no-brainer to us. Collaboration like that was patchy at best in the public sector, and limited at the time to same-sector and same-region contacts.

Lately, we invested in building web-based software to create the tools needed to drill down into the data in an intelligent and productive manner. That took a year to perfect.

Now we have achieved that – contracts due for renewal are available to view for a modest annual subscription. For suppliers, contracts that are out for tender are collated in one place.

Now, in the second half of 2015, we can finally make it available. The culmination of 6 years of effort.

Find out how Procure Tools puts this vital information at your fingertips.

Call us today on 0845 533 9095 or email us at info@procuretools.com.