Courier services

Tender description

NHS Supply Chain: food is seeking a distribution partner to deliver and manage chilled, frozen and ambient food products into the NHS and its trusts for their catering needs. This procurement is for: 1) The supply, storage and management of chilled, frozen and ambient food products (‘Distributor Managed Lines’) and distribution to trusts within the NHS; 2) The management and distribution to the customer(s) of nominated lines which will be the subject of a separate procurement event detailed in the tender documents. The Framework Agreement (FWA) will have an initial term of 24 months with an option to extend incrementally for a further 24 months. The FWA will be for a maximum term of 48 months. It is anticipated that in the first 12 months of the FWA the value will be in the region of 40 000 000 GBP. The full 48-month term (if extended) the anticipated value is circa 300 000 000 GBP. These values are approximate only and are based on the recent historical usage information with a forecasted level of growth. This is a unique opportunity to become a national distribution partner which aims to deliver significant savings to the NHS and abide by the principles set out in the carter report. This procurement will be known as the Multi Temperature Distribution (MTD) tender and the Authority will award a single supplier Framework Agreement to the most economically advantageous tenderer who will act as the single national distribution partner (the ‘Distributor’) for certain chilled, frozen and ambient food products for the NHS (the ‘Framework Agreement’ (FWA)). This Multi Temperature Distribution (MTD) procurement is the first of 2 procurement's, establishing a single Framework Agreement for a distribution partner and supply of distributor managed lines. NHS Supply Chain: food is following the restricted procedure pursuant to the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 for the award of this Framework Agreement. The first stage contains the Selection Questionnaire (SQ) or European Single Procurement Document (ESPD). Only for applicants that submit an ESPD — if there are any additional questions to be completed within the SQ part 1, 2 or 3 then it is the applicant’s responsibility to ensure you complete any questions in the SQ that are not covered in the ESPD. For applicants to be considered for this procurement and subsequently be invited to submit a bid for the second procurement, applicants must complete in full the SQ or ESPD. For full details on the requirements of this stage please refer to the SQ instruction document. The top 5 scoring applicants will be invited to submit tenders. Where more than 5 applicants pass the selection criteria, the 5 applicants achieving the highest score for the scored questions in Part 3 of the SQ will be invited to tender. Applicants who do not pass the SQ stage will be notified. This procurement is split into the following stages: Stage 1: selection questionnaire; Stage 2: selection process; Stage 3: invite short-listed suppliers to tender (max of 5); Stage 4: evaluation of tender; Stage 5: award. This MTD procurement is the first of 2 procurement's, establishing a single FWA for a distribution partner and supplier of Distributor Managed Lines (DML). NHS Supply Chain: Food is following the Restricted Procedure pursuant to the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 for the award of this FWA. Following this procurement, a second procurement will be launched for the supply of certain Nominated Lines (NL). The second procurement will be known as The Multi Temperature Products (MTP) procurement and will be for the supply of circa 200 selected NL including chilled, frozen and ambient food products covering categories such as: grocery, milk and dairy, meat and poultry, fruit and veg, fish and seafood, cold beverages, confectionery, hot beverages and sweet products (the ‘NL’). The NL will be delivered to the Distributor who will manage orders from and delivery to the customer(s). The NL are set out in the nominated line descriptions appendix. We have considered that it may not be possible to switch all trusts over to a single distributor on day one and there will therefore be a phased implementation of the new distribution solution. We have selected 35 NHS trusts for the initial phase (‘First Phased Implementation’) and these trusts are listed in the Phase 1 Top 35 trust delivery requirements appendix. Following the award of both this procurement and the MTP procurement, the distributor will launch the first phased implementation and will be available to supply the initial selected 35 NHS trusts. Once the first phased implementation has been successfully launched, we intend to roll out the new distribution solution to the following phases. Please refer to the Framework Agreement for further details. This procurement exercise will be conducted on the NHS Supply Chain: Food’s Procurement Portal at; https://esourcing.scanmarket.com/SupplierRegistration/NewSupplier?eventId=312507&ccsum=5809b7214366c44c100ccfa9b7c0c7da