HM Customs and Excise (HMC&E) had decided to move a substantial number of departments – and therefore staff – out of London to less expensive office accommodation in the north of England.
As it was a long time since such a large number of staff had been moved at the same time it had been decided to review, and if necessary change, the staff relocation policy and also to request tenders from relocation service companies for the move management services that would be required.
We were therefore called in as an industry expert by John Kinghorn of HMC&E to advise and assist his in-house team with the design and content of the new relocation policy and the preparation and subsequent appraisal of the tenders which would be requested from the relocation companies.
- Working closely with John and his team we first focused on the relocation policy and reviewed it against 'best practice' examples from both public and private sector organisations. Using quality and quantity as the guidelines we built a variety of individual relocation scenarios to measure both the acceptability ('quality') of the different policies to the staff being asked to move home as well as the cost ('quantity') to HMC&E.
- Informed by the variety of quantity/quality outcomes we put forward to the HMC&E senior management our recommendations of what the terms contents and conditions of the ideal policy should be in order to achieve the organisation's relocation aims, objectives and budgets. These were accepted.
- Using the new policy content and service requirements as the core structure we designed, prepared and drew up a tender document for completion and return by the relocation service suppliers so that we could use their responses in order to select the most suitable candidate.
- On receipt of the completed tenders our team met again to appraise the responses we had received. HMC&E first examined the financial standing of the various suppliers – and in fact eliminated three candidates that failed to meet the HMC&E requirements.
- We were specifically asked to examine the performance records claimed by the remaining group and using our experience and awareness were able to isolate claims by two firms that were obviously exaggerated in order to try to impress.
- Further discussion whittled the list down to three candidates and we strongly recommended that HMC&E should visit each candidate to talk to the key staff who would, if selected, be directly responsible for handling the moves of the HMC&E employees.
- This revealed marked differences between the service ethos and standards of the potential suppliers and actually led to a unanimous conclusion by our team that one particular company came out head and shoulders above the others.
With the conclusion of our involvement we were pleased to be told by John Kinghorn that we had made "an invaluable contribution" to the decision making process.
