best practice procurement and support

The Lancashire BPC event last Thursday saw a good number of organisations exhibiting and discussing procurement and support issues with around 70 delegates.  The objective of the day was to allow organisations in the Lancashire area to showcase their procurement requirements and or areas of support, and for delegates to find out their customers requirements and talk to organisations who may be able to support them.

Throughout the day there were a number of small seminars on related themes:

Clive Weston - College and Apprenticeship schemes available through ACCROS

Martin Brown - Bid To Win - ten top tips for improving bid submissions

David Parsons - BSRIA - an overview of the work of BSRIA

Andrew Platten - Sustainable Stars competition as part of the Constructing the Future October conference

Chris Gold - Elevates Women into Work programme

My thoughts on the day:

• a successful and well attended event with plenty of buzz and discussions. It was good to see small group discussions within the networking area.  The seminars were well attended with about 25 present at each. A formula for the club to repeat, taking on board the feedback from delegates and lessons learnt.

• as expected the sustainability based seminars generated the most discussion.  David from BSRIA generated discussions on biomass boilers not being suitable for schools,  on air tightness and zero carbon homes. Once again it was evident sustainability issues are only just being to be understood by construction people, with the efforts required for zero carbon targets of 2016 for example not fully appreciated as yet.

• on my ’stand’ I talked about and gave out information relating to fairsnape services.  I was also pleased to be able to communicate information and goodies on footprintfriends. However the take up on a free one to one session to demonstrate how using web2.0 on the Internet can save time, through bringing news, planning and project leads freely to your computer, was extremely poorly taken up.  Maybe if I charge a corporate fee the take up would be better?

Slides from the seminars should be available soon on the club pages