Founding Buyer Programme · Procurement Act 2023
Shape the market before it exists
The eSourcing Data Founding Buyer Programme invites a small number of utilities to help design a qualifying utilities dynamic market before it is established: the parts, the conditions of membership, the reporting and the procurement workflow. Founding buyers pay little or nothing for initial market access and get an assisted first procurement.
The structure is not finalised. That is the reason for the conversation rather than a pitch.
Start a conversationWhy the terms are generous
We want the procurement, not the licence fee
Buyer demand is the scarce side of a new market. A market with no buyers is worth nothing to suppliers, and a market with no suppliers is worth nothing to buyers. So the commercial objective for the founding cohort is not first-year licence revenue. It is committed procurement volume and a case study that is real enough to show the next buyer.
Which is also why a smaller utility that actually runs a procurement through the market is more valuable to us than a large one that provides a logo. If you are willing to transact, the terms reflect it.
How it runs
Five stages, each with a way out
Discovery
A 30 to 45 minute market-design interview. No sales commitment.
Design partner
You help shape the parts, the qualification standards, the reporting and the procurement workflow.
Founding buyer
Low or no initial market access cost, and an assisted first procurement.
Production buyer
Annual eSourcing OS licence, market access, and managed procurement if you want it.
Expansion
Contract management, social value and analytics across more of your categories.
The first conversation
What we would actually ask you
Thirty to forty-five minutes, and no commitment at the end of it. Here is the whole agenda, so you can decide whether it is worth the diary entry before you accept it.
- Which frameworks, UDMs or QUDMs you use now, and what they fail to solve.
- Which categories have weak competition, or poor SME and specialist coverage.
- What you expect to need over the next 12 to 24 months.
- The qualification, technical, insurance and social value standards you require.
- The internal approval and assurance barriers to using an externally operated market.
- What we would have to demonstrate before you would run one live procurement through it.
The last one matters most. If there is something we would have to prove before you would put a live requirement through the market, we would rather hear it now, while the design is still open.
Why utilities
The sector is not chosen yet, and that is deliberate
A qualifying utilities dynamic market is only available to utilities, and it carries commercial options no other route has: membership-related supplier fees are permitted, and tenders may be shown to members only. That is what allows a market to be properly administered over years rather than established and then starved. It is the reason the first eSourcing Data-operated market is a utilities market.
Which utilities sector is still open. A selection exercise is running across water and wastewater, electricity distribution and transmission, gas, ports, airports and qualifying transport activities. Water is not assumed. These are the criteria, published because a buyer asking “why should it be my sector” deserves the actual answer.
Buyer conversations are part of how this is decided, not a consequence of it. A sector where two organisations will engage seriously beats one that looks better on paper and where nobody will take a meeting.
The offer, concretely
What “help shape the market” actually means
It is a phrase that usually means nothing, so here is the list of decisions a design partner genuinely has a say over. Most of them cannot be revisited once the market is established.
Scope and the activities covered
What is in the market and what is deliberately outside it. Drawn too wide and it means nothing; too narrow and it cannot carry your programme.
Parts and categories
How the market divides. This decides whether a specialist can join the part that fits them or gets sized out by a category drawn for national contractors.
Conditions of membership
The bar suppliers must clear. The single most consequential decision on this list, because for a dynamic market the conditions are fixed at establishment and cannot be changed for the market’s whole life.
Evidence requirements
What suppliers must actually produce, and in what form. Set heavily and you exclude the SMEs you wanted; set lightly and you spend years managing around suppliers you should not have admitted.
Competition and call-off rules
How work is competed inside the market: who is invited, on what basis, and what a standard competition looks like so setting one up takes days rather than weeks.
Reporting and management information
What you need to see, and what your board or regulator needs to see. Far easier to design in than to retrofit.
Service levels
How quickly applications are assessed, clarifications answered and competitions stood up. The numbers we publish are the numbers you help set.
The conditions of membership matter more than everything else combined, because section 36(7)(b) fixes them for the life of the market. Nobody gets to adjust them in year two after discovering the bar was in the wrong place. That is precisely why buyer and supplier input before establishment is worth having, and worth having early.
What you are agreeing to
Commitment, stage by stage
“Founding buyer” sounds like something you sign. It is not, until the point where it is, and by then you will have seen the design you helped produce.
The other direction
What we have to demonstrate to you
A founding buyer is taking a risk on something that does not exist yet. The burden of proof is ours, and these are the five things we expect to have to evidence rather than assert.
That the market will actually be operated
Establishment is easy and operation is not. We publish the service standards, and a market operations function exists to meet them rather than a shared inbox somebody checks.
That the legal work is done properly
Scope, permitted users, conditions, exclusion process, fees, buyer access terms, competition rules, data protection, notices and complaints, all drafted and legally reviewed before anything is published.
That there are suppliers in it
Recruitment runs before establishment, not after. A market whose first competition attracts three bids has failed in front of the buyer who trusted it.
That your approvals can be satisfied
Information security, data protection, service levels, financial standing and insurance. We would rather meet your assurance team early than discover a blocker after the design is fixed.
That you keep control
You set the strategy, own the criteria and make every award decision. What is delegated is administration, and that distinction should be visible in the documents, not just asserted here.
Timing
Where this is going, and when
Dates move when decisions do. The long pole is almost never the build, it is internal approval on the buyer side, which is why we would rather meet your assurance and information security people early than discover a blocker after the design is fixed.
The awkward question
What if it does not happen?
Fair question, and the honest answer is that you will have spent some hours on market design and lost nothing else. There is no fee to be a design partner, no commitment before the founding buyer stage, and no procurement of yours is dependent on the market existing until you decide to put one through it.
What you would take away regardless is a properly worked view of your own category: how it should be lotted, what conditions of participation are proportionate for it, where your supplier market is thin, and which route actually fits. That work is useful whether we establish the market, you establish your own, or you decide a framework was the right answer all along.
And if using a market operated by somebody else turns out not to be something your organisation will accept, the second route is open: we design, establish and operate vehicles under a buyer’s own name, on the same platform. That conversation is usually the larger one.
Once it is live
What using it actually looks like
The market has a life cycle that repeats, and almost all of it happens without you. Your involvement is concentrated at the two points where judgement is required: defining what you want, and deciding who wins.
The real decision
Join a market, or commission your own?
Most utilities weighing this treat it as one question. It is two, and they have genuinely different answers depending on what you are optimising for.
Joining a market we operate
Lower cost to start, faster to use, and the supplier market is already qualified and maintained. The administration is entirely ours, and it is shared across every buyer using the market, which is what makes proper operation affordable rather than a luxury.
Best where you want access to a qualified supply chain without standing up an operations function, and where sharing a market with comparable organisations is acceptable or actively useful.
Commissioning your own
Your name, your conditions, your rules, and a market that exists to serve your programme rather than a sector. We design, establish and operate it, so you get the vehicle without building the operations function behind it. Higher cost, and considerably more control.
Best where your programme is large enough to justify a dedicated market, where your requirements are distinctive, or where using an externally operated market is not something your organisation would accept.
The question that usually settles it is not cost, it is whether a shared market can carry conditions that suit you. Where your qualification requirements are close to the sector norm, sharing is efficient and the liquidity benefits you. Where they are genuinely distinctive, a shared market either excludes suppliers you want or admits ones you do not, and at that point your own vehicle is the cheaper answer despite costing more.
You do not have to decide now. Both conversations start the same way, and the discovery stage is the same conversation whichever route you eventually take.
Who this suits
We would rather have the transaction than the logo
A smaller utility that actually runs a million-pound procurement through the market in its first quarter is worth more to us than a major one that agrees to appear on a slide. That is not modesty, it is arithmetic: the case study that persuades the next buyer is a completed procurement with a result, and a name on a website is not one.
So the founding cohort is deliberately small, three to five organisations, and what makes a good one is not size. It is a procurement team that can decide, an identifiable requirement in the next six to eighteen months, and a willingness to say plainly what is wrong with the routes to market you have now.
An anchor organisation whose participation reassures others is genuinely valuable, and we would like one. But a market of anchors that never transacts is a press release, and we have all seen those.
If the answer is no
You do not have to use our market
Plenty of organisations will not use a commercial vehicle operated by somebody else, for reasons that are entirely sound. That does not end the conversation. We also design, establish and operate frameworks, open frameworks and dynamic markets under a buyer’s own name, on the same platform. Usually the second route is the larger piece of work.
Starting
What to send, if you want the conversation
Nothing formal. A line saying which sector you are in and roughly what you buy is enough to establish whether there is anything worth discussing, and we will tell you quickly if there is not.
If you want the first conversation to be useful rather than exploratory, three things are worth bringing: the categories where your current route to market is not working, anything substantial you expect to procure in the next twelve to eighteen months, and whoever in your organisation would have to approve using a market operated externally. That third one saves the most time, because it is what most often stops these conversations six weeks in, long after everybody has invested effort.
Questions
The Founding Buyer Programme, answered
What is the Founding Buyer Programme?
eSourcing Data is establishing a qualifying utilities dynamic market under the Procurement Act 2023, and is inviting a small number of utilities to help shape it before it is established. Founding buyers influence the parts, the conditions of membership, the reporting and the procurement workflow, and receive low or no initial market access cost.
What does it cost to be a founding buyer?
Low or no initial market access cost, and an assisted first procurement. Buyer demand is the scarce side at launch, so the commercial objective for the founding cohort is committed procurement volume and a credible case study rather than first-year licence revenue.
Do we have to commit to anything at the first conversation?
No. The first stage is a 30 to 45 minute market-design interview with no sales commitment. It is there to understand the gaps in your existing routes to market and what is coming up in your pipeline. If the market is not right for you, that is a useful answer.
Which utilities sector will the first market cover?
Not yet decided. A selection exercise is running across water and wastewater, electricity distribution and transmission, gas, ports, airports and qualifying transport activities. The first market needs to be narrow enough to create supplier density and broad enough to generate repeat demand, and buyer conversations are part of how that is decided.
What if we would never use a market operated by someone else?
That is a reasonable position and it does not end the conversation. eSourcing Data also designs, establishes and operates commercial vehicles under a buyer’s own name, on eSourcing OS. Organisations that will not join an externally operated market usually take that route instead.
Does this replace our ERP or enterprise eSourcing platform?
No. eSourcing OS can provide the continuously qualified supplier market and the procurement workflow alongside what you already run, with integration considered later. Replacing an incumbent stack is not a precondition of taking part.
Worth a conversation?
Thirty to forty-five minutes, no commitment, and the market design is still open enough for what you say to change it.
Start a conversation