SUPPLY Lincolnshire has officially unveiled a brand new service designed to simplify the way the county’s biggest public and private sector organisations source local suppliers.
SUPPLY Lincolnshire’s web-based Supplier Portal, an online ‘marketplace’ for Lincolnshire businesses, aims to help connect some of the region's largest purchasing organisations to local suppliers. An added benefit of the site will also be that purchasing organisations will also have the ability to search for and invite suppliers to respond to contract opportunities.
Sara Kendall, Senior Project Officer for SUPPLY Lincolnshire, commented: “We’ve designed the `Business Lincolnshire Supplier Portal’ to work alongside the `Source Lincolnshire’ contract opportunity website as the go-to places for large enterprises and Lincolnshire SMEs to visit when looking to procure or win lucrative new contracts.
“The feedback we’ve received from SMEs tells us that they often have trouble sourcing local opportunities and knowing whether or not their business is eligible for the contract. Larger companies, on the other hand, have said they find themselves struggling to connect with a large portion of Lincolnshire SMEs with potential to become suppliers.
“What the Business Lincolnshire Supplier Portal does is provide a central marketplace where businesses can post information about the goods and services they provide, in addition to offering larger organisations the facility to conduct procurement exercises securely on-line.”
Councillor Colin Davie, Executive Member for Economic Development at LCC, said: “Now that the Business Lincolnshire’s Supplier Portal is live online, our hope is that it will be used by both large enterprises and county SMEs as a way of keeping more contracts within the area.
“One of the overall goals of SUPPLY Lincolnshire is to help local companies thrive, and a good way to do that is by helping them discover the opportunities that are right on their doorstep and encouraging them to support one another by sourcing locally where possible.
“Alongside a combination of one-to-one support and workshops, the Supplier Portal is another useful tool that SMEs will hopefully take advantage of as part of the SUPPLY Lincolnshire project.”
www.businesslincolnshire.com/supplylincs
Thomas Moore added: “The Supplier Portal is still in it’s infancy, though, so we encourage SMEs to register their details to the site so we can continue building the most comprehensive website possible.
“Larger businesses interested in signing up as a ‘purchaser’ should also register their details on the website. Not only will doing this allow them access to the named contacts of each registered business, instead of a standard sales e-mail or telephone number, but also the ability to create contracting opportunities and select registered businesses to view and respond to those opportunities.”
In partnership with Procurement Lincolnshire and the Greater Lincolnshire Local Enterprise Partnership, Lincolnshire County Council successfully secured £251,000 from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) to help stimulate the Lincolnshire economy by developing and supporting supply chains within the county’s key sectors.
In addition to preparing SMEs to win contracts with the county’s largest organisations, SUPPLY Lincolnshire is also focused on connecting smaller Lincolnshire companies with one another to encourage buying and trading locally.
For more information about SUPPLY Lincolnshire, visit www.businesslincolnshire.com/supply or e-mail supply@lincolnshire.gov.uk.
