As part of Digital Drive’s first birthday celebrations on 30th January 2019, we’re profiling some of the businesses involved in the programme so far...
Company Name
Hudson Procurement Group
Your Name
Ashleigh Phillips
What does your business do?
Hudson Procurement Group are committed to growing every single business with which we engage by helping them push for tendering success. We help our clients to discover new opportunities for work, understand which opportunities are most suitable, as well as helping them to the finish line, creating beautiful and functional content and corporate literature to push for a win every time they tender for a contract. We help clients discover opportunities through our online tender tracking portals and help them win work through our consultancy offering, assisting companies of all sizes and sectors with bids and tender proposals.
What’s your biggest success/ achievement of the past year?
We’ve seen many highlights in the past year and we’re very proud of what we’ve achieved for both our client’s and our Group. In 2018, Hudson Procurement Group won the National Best New Business Award for service and our founder was shortlisted for Business Woman of the Year – twice. We launched Tender VLE the UK’s first, free virtual learning environment for tendering and also launched our retained service Tender Manager, which focuses on continuous support for our customers. Whilst all this was happening, we doubled our turnover and were shortlisted for the most innovative business and the National Best New Business Awards. Our clients are so important to us, so seeing our customer base grow from 312 to 643 clients has been brilliant. Because of our continual growth, we’ve expanded our team, by welcoming 8 new talented individuals. On top of this, we were thrilled to open new offices in both London and Manchester.
As you can tell, the past year has presented us with many great achievements that we’re continually proud of.
What’s been the best part of the Digital Drive programme for you so far?
The business has utilised the funding aspect of digital drive to invest in an internal videographer team and equipment to create the first online virtual learning platform for tendering and bid writing: www.tendervle.co.uk. This new, innovative and free of charge learning environment has been hailed by suppliers as an invaluable resource for their tendering endeavours.
Our Tender VLE platform has received thousands of unique hits since its launch and has been a great value add to our 500+ portal customers. It helped us open doors with companies to talk about our consultancy offering. Tender VLE has allowed us to showcase our knowledge and expertise as well as having helped suppliers to win work by breaking down the tendering process and associated important information, into manageable, accessible and digestible online modules. This has led to a sizeable increase in business for us, allowing customers to see a sample of our in-house expertise, thereby increasing their confidence in us as an organisation. Indeed, we have found that this has made suppliers more likely to trust us to win work on their behalf, thereby increasing our business exponentially and allowing us to recruit and train new graduates, adding yet more young procurement experts to the local talent pool.
What’s next for your business over the coming year?
The business is currently exploring the American market and looking at how AI will have an impact on procurement in the future. We are looking at launching the clickable prototype of an innovative new product in 2019, that will help make the procurement process fairer, more transparent and more accessible for buyers and suppliers alike. Our Growth Director has already recently been nominated for an award because of this.