An integrated approach to procurement at Buckingham

2 November 2020

Buckingham Group Contracting Ltd is a leading construction company that provides total construction solutions to a wide range of industrial sectors.  

Established in 1955, the company has grown into a main contractor undertaking major infrastructure projects.It has built several sports-related buildings in recent years, including the London 2012 Olympic Handball Arena (now known as the Copper Box), a pit lane development at Silverstone Circuit including the Silverstone Wing, and the Amex Stadium, home of Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club.

It also undertakes civil engineering works including major earthworks and enabling, highways and multi-storey car parks, demolition and remedial works and rail-related infrastructure projects.

Quiet Storm has worked with the Buckingham Group on several key projects in recent years, including the creation of a build project mapping CRM system, and also a resource management CRM to help ensure it is optimising the capacity of its workforce at all times.  

A bespoke dashboard to manage procurement

Because of the sheer breadth of projects that Buckingham Group gets involved in, it needs to keep a close eye on its procurement activities. This is to ensure that due diligence is being properly carried out for all its supply partners, it is achieving best value from its purchases and that it is mitigating unnecessary risk by not placing too many orders with a small number of suppliers.

As a large company with several divisions, including construction, civils, sports & leisure and rail, it wanted to find a way of aligning its procurement activities across the whole group. This was to help it achieve economies of scale and best value when procuring across the group, and ensure it wasn’t becoming too reliant on certain suppliers for big projects.

We created a cloud-based dashboard to give its senior team a holistic view of its procurement activities to help spread its orders and mitigate the risk. It ensures that prior to an order being placed with a particular supplier by one division of the business, all divisions are aware of it. This means any similar orders can be married up before they are placed, so greater economies of scale can be achieved, or the orders can be spread between suppliers if it creates too much risk for the business.  

‘Aligning our operations’

Nick Smith, Buckingham’s Chief Technical Officer, said:

“We’ve worked with Quiet Storm on key projects for several years and the digital tools they have built for us have become an integral part of our operations. As a large organisation, making sure that our operations are aligned across the business is important because it helps us to break down silo working and improve efficiency. 

“The procurement dashboard Quiet Storm built has given us full visibility of group purchasing, which enables better decision-making and a more joined-up approach to procurement across all our divisions.”

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