[Case Study]: Ground Control

Ground Control is one of the UK’s leading landscaping and external solution providers, offering services such as Ground Maintenance, Arboriculture & Vegetation Management, Landscape Construction, Design and many more to the commercial sector.

Why Market Dojo?

In covering such a vast array of categories within the Construction Division, the procurement team at Ground control needed a simple and effective way of streamlining their processes.

When appointed, Ground Control’s Head of Procurement, Dan Firth, was tasked with “taking a more strategic approach to procurement” and so one element of that was to introduce an eProcurement tool.

Dan had previously used Sourcing Dojo at his last company, Interserve. His experience using our software played a part in his decision to bring the Market Dojo tools with him to Ground Control.

“I’d obviously been impressed by Sourcing Dojo using it at Interserve, finding it easy to use and pretty obvious in what it was trying to achieve. So although I had a brief look at other options, I engaged with Market Dojo to look at what the right modules would be and what this would cost.

I didn’t run too much of a competitive process, it was more about basing my decision on what I had done previously on a product that I knew, and in my mind, it has proved to be very successful.”

How Ground Control have used Market Dojo

The first thing that Dan and his team tackled with the tool, was setting up a comprehensive set of Onboarding questions for their suppliers. This was achieved through creating a number of questionnaires using SIM Dojo, that could be sent to suppliers to clarify details such as company size, size of anticipated spend as well as risk.

“What’s been great about using SIM Dojo is we can put a logic flow in the questionnaires so that people only see the relevant questions. For example, on modern slavery lots of the questions, you don’t get asked if you’re under thirty-six million turnover, because that is the limit at which you are legally obliged to report on it.”

By using SIM Dojo, the team have been able to take their previous method of spreadsheets and centralise everything together within a single tool.

“There was previously a process using spreadsheets, but this has replaced that and it has formalised the process so now there is a much more rigorous on-boarding process.

We can now demonstrate to ourselves, and to our customers that we have a compliant and diverse set of suppliers, and that we’ve done due diligence in creating our supply chain. It’s important for both us and our clients to be able to demonstrate that we are managing our processes and suppliers in a professional way.”

In addition to onboarding suppliers, the team at Ground Control have also used Sourcing Dojo to run their tenders, collecting useful information from their suppliers prior to any formal engagement.

“We’ve done some work to help set up formal documentation and formal contracts with a range of our preferred suppliers, but more importantly we’ve run a number of tenders using the software, including our mobile phone contract, PPE, fencing, builders merchants, fuel cards and occupational health.

The Sourcing Dojo software has been really useful in collecting information from suppliers at the initial stage of the tenders. We have then followed this up with detailed negotiations with selected suppliers.”

Our Partnership

So what was it about Market Dojo, that made us stand out against our competitors, to Dan and the team at Ground Control?

“I have had experience of using other online tendering systems, but what I’ve found is that the Market Dojo package was a lot more user-friendly.

It’s been great that Market Dojo has been able to work with us to start to address things and actually put changes into the system. So I guess another thing that’s worked well for us, is that if we worked with a bigger supplier I don’t think they would be listening to what we wanted as changes, whereas with Market Dojo are of the size that they’re responsive to what we’re doing.”

At Market Dojo, we are always keen to collaborate with our clients to improve our software, as ultimately who better to suggest improvements than users of our tools?

We have worked closely with Ground Control, as we have with a number of our clients, to improve and add features across our range of tools.

In doing so, as well as making our products more user-friendly for the people using them, we’ve been able to strengthen our relationships with our clients.

“All the people I’ve worked with at Market Dojo have been great, knowledgeable, friendly and helpful, and they respond promptly. I can only speak with the highest regard for the team, both the professionalism and responsiveness with which all the things we’ve had have been dealt with. So I’ve been very pleased with that. Being able to, for example, send suppliers direct to the Market Dojo help desk knowing that they will get their issues sorted out, has been really helpful.”

And finally, after almost a year of working with Market Dojo, how do Ground Control summarise their use of Market Dojo’s tools?

“From my point of view, we are really pleased, we’ve got very good functionality and great support.

In terms of service, it’s great, keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t lose the bespoke personal touch that you’ve got.”