Almost £100million worth of work on the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route (AWPR) recently came up for grabs on a website aimed at tendering contracts to small local businesses.
Any firm that might succeed in winning the £800,000 job to supply drainage for the Connect Roads Consortium which is building the £745million bypass might thank the Scottish Government for wanting to include small firms in the estimated £10billion it spends every year.
But they could also spare some gratitude too for Tim Williams, the founder and managing director Millstream Associates which runs the Public Contracts Scotland (PCS) website.
He set up his firm in Aberdeen in the late 1980s, with just three staff. Millstream now has almost 50 staff and has successfully built its own tendering websites, Tenders Direct and myTenders websites, which provide private companies with information on business opportunities in the public sector, particularly Europe.
In addition to PCS, it also runs procurement websites for Wales and recently launched a Norwegian service, myTenders Norge, after running the national portal for the Norwegian government for eight years.
Mr Williams said: “The AWPR contracts have been trickling out over a period of time.
“On PCS we have developed part of the site to specialise on large infrastructure projects.”
Other projects that have passed through the PCS site was the new Forth road bridge, as well as the work for recent Commonwealth Games.
“What the Scottish Government is trying to do with large contracts at the moment is to write in that the consortium that wins it needs to advertise the subcontracts on PCS, so you get more stuff into the local supply chain,” he says.
A new European Directive, which came into force in April, will require that governments in Great Britain to break up larger contracts into smaller lots as well as ensure they are all available electronically by 2016.
It is step forward for smaller firms that have long complained that major public infrastructure projects are to complex and too large for smaller firms to even get a look in.
“The larger the contract, the more that the bigger more well established companies are more interested,” says Mr Williams. “They are almost always better equipped to win these contracts – they have better financial strength, a better track record, they have all the policies and procedures the public sector are looking for. Smaller companies just tend not to be as good at doing that – it is an overhead. It is an investment you have to make up front before you can win any public sector work.”
He dismisses the potential impact of the UK potentially moving out of the EU if the next government progresses with an in/out referendum on Europe.
“As far as the UK is concerned, governments are going down the line of more openness in public tendering anyway. Although the European Union has taken the lead in pushing transparency and electronic tendering, I don’t think any current UK parties would want to go back from where they have got to.”
He started out with a degree in marine biology from Heriot- Watt University in Edinburgh. This required learning how to deep sea dive, which means he “fell in by mistake” to diving for the oil and gas industry. Eventually he ended up in Aberdeen.
Once he was done with the deep sea, he was working for BP in procurement and eventually he struck on the idea of setting up a company on his own.
“We’d send information by post or fax to companies who were interested.
“When we set up in 1991, the internet didn’t exists, we were distributing info by fax. We would do it overnight so we could benefit from cheaper call charges after 6pm,” he recalls.
“We also had to dial in to get into the European Commission computers in order to download it in the first place. It was a very laborious process. The internet has made things much easier.”
The company now enjoys a turnover of about £4.7million. He says the company is debt free and is in a good position to take advantage of consolidation in the market. He is looking at other European countries, as they set up electronic tendering site, to grow the firm.