Managing a national supply chain in Local Supply Chain

Sourcing local subcontractors is one of the key deliverables of the LSC platform. LSC is used by many major contractors to manage their entire supply chain and associated processes across the UK and throughout their organisations. The ‘local’ element of LSC helps major organisations source, manage and engage higher levels of subcontractors within the vicinity of their projects all over the UK.

LSC has a suite of tools to help organisations meet, exceed and evidence local spend KPIs. The functionality available through these in-built tools, allows major contracting organisations to demonstrate and evidence their ability to efficiently engage local SMEs on a project-by-project basis. In addition to sourcing local contractors, the platform holds a database of UK wide subcontractors, should estimators and commercial teams wish to engage contractors on a wider basis (outside the project area) something we’ve found crucial, particularly where specialty trades or experiences are required.

With the above in mind it’s important to understand that, although our name suggests an emphasis on local networks of subcontractors, Local Supply Chain can and does manage national supply chains for many of our clients.

Access a national database: Within LSC, our customers have access to over 25,000 organisations. There are various search functions and filters to help buyers carve out a supply chain most relevant to those they are looking to engage. These include the typical filters you would expect to see such as location and distance from project location, Health & Safety accreditations, trades or services etc down to the more granular information such as financial records, trade specific documentation and insurances etc.

Identifying your own supply chain: LSC simplifies the categorising of customer’s supply chains using our ‘label’ tool. Customers can create their own labels such as Approved, Strategic Partner, Specialised and apply one or more to the subcontractors within your supply chain. Customers can also apply rules to labels such as expiry dates as a subcontractor may be only be approved for one or two years before they need a review. Our labels can also restrict who teams can award work to i.e. enquiry only, providing a level of governance and a strong link between your supply chain managers and commercial teams.

Subcontractor Profiles: all subcontractors who register on LSC can complete a profile. When engaging organisations for your projects and procurements, LSC automatically captures and provides extensive reports on this information. This can include information such as company turnover, number of employees, number of apprentices, types of organisation (SMEs, social enterprise, microbusiness etc), office locations (using the nearest for local spend calculations) and types of services offered. Organisations can upload important compliance certifications and information also, which may include things like their PAS91 certifications and third-party accreditation assessments.

Engagement statistics: the more your organisation uses LSC the more the system will learn about how you engage with your supply chain and vice versa. Using the tender management module, LSC will automatically capture invite to tender rates, open rates, document downloads and response rates across expressions of interest and invites to tender at tender and contract stage of each project.

Awards & Feedback: LSC captures the number of, value and percentages of awards in relation to tenders issued to each subcontractor. This helps us identify any subcontractors our clients may be close to overloading and any that are engaging well with each organisation. Following an award, it’s very quick and easy to provide feedback on lost tenders to the unsuccessful subcontractors. This is a huge hit for the subcontractors using Local Supply Chain and something our clients see as a huge advantage over their competitors when it comes to two-way engagement with their supply chains.

Performance: we have a fully inbuilt and flexible performance module with templates that can geared around your organisation. Performance reviews can be scheduled, automatically issued, assigned and re-assigned and have low score warnings which will trigger e-mails to relevant individuals across your business. Providing, in real-time, a complete oversight of how well your supply chain are performing overall, as individual subcontractors, on projects and even for entire frameworks.

Above we have highlighted a few key features of Local Supply Chain and how embedding supply chain management into procurement processes through cloud-based technology is ensuring our existing clients are one step ahead of their competition.

For more information or to schedule a demo of our platform and it’s wider capabilities, please contact us.