Step Two - agreeing the procurement approach

Your project plan should include details of the preferred procurement approach. The choice of procurement approach can influence your timetable as it will introduce defined milestones.

In an EDRM project you will need to make one or more procurements.

Procuring consultancy and project management support

Firstly you may need to procure some third party consultancy support or project management support. Depending on the size and duration of the project you can either run a competitive procurement where you write a brief for the work, invite three quotations and select the best value proposal or you can use S-CAT and select the required category of service and then select three known suppliers and send your brief out to them. You could use the EU OJEC procurement route but this should not be needed if you have a list of consultants/project management specialists. One point to note here is that many of the specialist independent consultancies in the EDRM area are not large enough to figure on the approved list of S-CAT providers. Hence if you have a list of consultants that you want to invite to tender you may need to contact them direct to find out the name of their S-CAT partner and then invite their partner company to respond.

When procuring consultancy support you should clarify whether you require records management support or EDRM procurement support or both and you should seek references where work has been done of a similar nature to that you require.

When procuring project support expertise it is still worth specifying that this is an EDRM procurement and hence you would prefer project management staff who have experience of managing similar projects.