Procurement evaluation preparation cut from three weeks to four days

The situation

The procurement team at a unitary authority in the North of England was handling a growing pipeline of tenders with the same headcount it had five years ago. A typical above-threshold exercise meant reading specification documents, dozens of supplier responses and compliance evidence packs — several hundred pages per evaluation — before scoring could even begin.

First-pass review alone was taking officers up to three weeks per exercise. Evaluation notes varied in structure from officer to officer, which made moderation slower and audit responses harder. The team had experimented with generic AI chat tools, but copying procurement documents into a public tool was ruled out on data-protection grounds almost immediately.

They did not need a chatbot. They needed a controlled system that worked inside their governance rules.

What we did

Discovery mapped the evaluation workflow end to end: where documents arrived, who touched them, what good evaluation notes looked like and where time actually went. The biggest sink was not scoring — it was assembling and cross-referencing material so that scoring could start.

We designed and built a procurement support system around that finding: document summarisation against the specification, side-by-side supplier response comparison, compliance evidence checks with missing-item flags, and draft evaluation notes in the team’s own template. The system was co-built with two senior officers so the team understood how prompts, permissions and outputs worked, and could adjust them after handover.

Governance was designed in, not added later: role-based access, an audit log on every AI-assisted step, a usage guide agreed with information governance, and a clear acceptable-use policy for the team.

The human role

Officers retain full accountability for every score and every award decision. The system prepares — summaries, comparisons, flags and drafts. People decide. Moderation panels review AI-assisted notes exactly as they reviewed manual ones, and the audit log shows which content was machine-prepared and which was officer judgement.

Results

Measured against the baseline agreed at design stage, first-pass review time fell by around 60%. Preparation for a typical evaluation now takes four working days instead of three weeks. Evaluation notes follow one consistent structure, which has shortened moderation and made audit responses materially faster. Fourteen officers were trained, and the team now runs the system without CedarPro’s involvement.

“The surprise was not the time saving — it was how much calmer evaluations feel. Everything is in one place, in the same format, with a trail we can stand behind.”
— Head of Procurement, unitary authority (anonymised)

What the client keeps

The working system, the prompt and workflow library, the governance pack and audit-log procedure, a trained officer group with two internal system owners, and an improvement backlog the team prioritises themselves.