A successful Meet the Buyer event!

PRESS RELEASE

Supporting our local businesses during lockdown

Release on 17/11/20

STAR Procurement have held their first ever virtual Meet the Buyer event. This event focussed on helping our local businesses during lockdown, and took place to coincide with World Procurement Week.

This event moved to an on-line format due to the Covid restrictions in place. And in a change to the usual format, the event took place over a week instead of one day, to give more options and flexibility to our local suppliers and small businesses. There were over 25 sessions across the week and nearly 600 bookings made, and included top tips for tendering, Social Value, ethical procurement, and industry specific updates.

Our Councils believe that it is more important than ever that our approach to procurement continues to support our local business communities and SME/VCSE sector. STAR has a ‘10 point plan’ to provide further assistance throughout the continuation of lockdown, and we will be updating on progress shortly.

Feedback from local businesses who attended the MTB has been very positive. Knights Corporate Workwear based in Stockport stated,

'On behalf of my team we wanted to thank all of you who had input for this, we found it very educational and felt like we learnt a lot so big thanks from us here!’

Director of STAR, Lorraine Cox stated,

“I am delighted that so many local businesses joined us for our first virtual Meet the Buyer event. It has always been a priority for us to engage with and support our local businesses and VCSE/SME’s but the impact of Covid makes this more important than ever before. Public procurement has such potential to support our businesses now and to help us to ‘build back better’. This is just one of the methods we are using, but our ‘10 point plan’ shows the breadth of support we are putting in place, including targeted Social Value, flexible procurement approaches and stronger forward planning so the business communities can mobilise”.

STAR is a public sector shared procurement service, established in 2014. STAR has moved from a three to a six partner organisation and works collaboratively with its Councils, and Clinical Commissioning Groups, supports Greater Manchester Combined Authority and leads a large percentage of collaborative procurement across Greater Manchester Councils.

For more information please contact:

Name: Nichola Cooke

Email Address: nichola.cooke@star-procurement.gov.uk

Phone: 0161 912 1616

Website: www.star-procurement.gov.uk

Twitter: @STARProcurement

 

Posted on Thursday 19th November 2020