Naval letter

It is often the case that on closer inspection although the parent group is rated against a certain model the organisation that actually does the work or its subcontractors are not - so this can be a very useful thing to check

The fourth method is not necessarily concerned with the supplier itself but with what other suppliers have done in the past on similar projects This would be an akin to a benchmarking type exercise . For example if a supplier was quoting to build a new supermarket in a certain time it

should be possible to look at previous supermarket builds and then use this as a comparison against the supplier . This could extend not just to the timescales but also the resources , the cost to see whether the supplier was actually being realistic in his estimates . So for example if he thought he could build it with 10 staff and ?100K but all other previous supermarkets have cost ?200K and required 50 staff would flag an immediate warning signal . So further discussion with the supplier would be needed for example , to understand why his costs were lower and indeed this may be the case if he is employing staff from overseas but then this would also flag up the issue of competency of these staff and language barriers . So this can be a very powerful tool in ensuring the supplier has realistic lead times

The final method is to review the experience of the supplier on previous projects . In our organisation we often have large complex projects to manage and deliver . However , the suppliers that do these are often relatively few in number and extremely experienced so much so that they have built up an extremely good track record of delivering similar type projects to the agreed cost , time...