Professional and Technical Services – breaking into the Defence Sector

Arcadis

Professional and Technical Services – breaking into the Defence Sector

Background

The international sustainable design, engineering and consultancy Arcadis had a well-established public sector presence in UK — but not in Defence. Arcadis had a long-term goal of breaking into the Defence Infrastructure sector and approached WaND to help prepare and implement an engagement strategy.

Challenges

The Technical and Professional services sector within Defence had been dominated by long-entrenched suppliers. Arcadis needed to convince the Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) that, as a new party, it could provide the necessary ‘client-side’ multidisciplinary technical services and bring innovation to respond to MOD’s planned major investment in the military estate. To do this Arcadis also needed to rapidly gain understanding of DIO and wider UK Defence to be able to respond compellingly to formal procurement opportunities, at short notice.

How WaND provided support and outcome

Using our defence infrastructure, project, commercial and military user experience, we provided Arcadis’ nascent defence team with essential understanding from the Defence Operating Model to the dynamics between DIO, its TLB customer base and military end users.

We helped develop the engagement strategy, enabling Arcadis to raise its profile in the defence arena. We identified particular organisational strengths relevant to defence infrastructure and brought our detailed market knowledge to identify the best opportunities to target. This ensured that the Arcadis defence team was ‘match fit’ for opportunities when presented to industry.

When DIO’s ECAM procurement was launched to provide client-side technical support services across the breadth of defence infrastructure, we applied the WaND methodology to support Arcadis’ bid response. We were delighted that Arcadis were awarded the maximum permitted 2 positions — for all projects in the South East, and as nationwide Accommodation lead — beating long-established competitors to become DIO’s first new technical services partner in many years.

From this strong start Arcadis have become established in Defence, leading the Single Living Accommodation discipline and we have gone on to help Arcadis win strategic partnering roles on the multi-billion pound Defence Estates Optimisation Programme and in Estate Management Planning. We continue to advise them through procurement activities and strategically in assessing industry partners to joint venture with where appropriate.

“For all our experience in bidding for work across the public sector, we knew that we needed help to achieve a break-through in Defence procurement. Ian Dennison and the WaND team provided invaluable, expert guidance and support on helping us read between the lines of the tender requirements. They advised on the context and nuances of DIO’s procurement language and terms and helped ensure that our proposal would translate well to a Defence audience. Most notably, they acted as part of our team, invested in our ambition and focused on results – which turned out to be outstanding.”

Mark Langdale – Arcadis

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Our Partners

We have a number of informal strategic partnering arrangements with other sector specialists and often work alongside them when supporting a client as our services are complementary. These include Cargyll, Akerlof, Electi, SecureConstruct and HLM Architects.