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Alan Bramwell of Clancy Consulting told delegates about how the SME Forum was drawing in views from SME members to help direct how ACE supports business.
Following its launch in the last year, Alan Bramwell said that one of the forum’s first acts was to establish an SME survey. This heard the views of SME members and lead to new insight about how SMEs use ACE services while raising a number of issues that concern SMEs, including issues around procurement practices.
Plans for the future development of the group would see an online forum created to enable SMEs to more easily interact with ACE. The group was also looking to establish itself in the regions and become a stronger voice for SMEs with its chair on ACE’s board.
Mr Bramwell also noted a particular success for the group within ACE, helping to direct the creation of Benchmarking Lite, a simplified and free benchmarking service dedicated to smaller ACE members.
Beyond ACE, he said SMEs faced a lot of the same challenges as large firms. The industry they operate in is not a different one to the largest consultant engineers and Large and small firms happily co-exist and engage with each other across the industry.
However, he noted they faced some specific problems such as the nature of some Pre-Qualification Questionnaires that effectively exclude small firms from tendering processes.
So he stressed the SME Forum would feed into ACE’s work to improve conditions in these areas.
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