How Apex Contractors transformed procurement processes and halved contract turnaround times

Guided by experience

Tom Taylor joined the construction industry 24 years ago.

As commercial director at Apex Contractors, a principal contractor delivering education, care, public sector and commercial projects across London and the South East, Taylor knows where technology earns its keep. ‘The greatest benefits come from tech that improves efficiency, supports on-site management and provides a common data environment, so that all project stakeholders are working from an accurate, consistent information set.’

Much of Apex’s senior team comes from a Tier 1 background, and it shows in how they think about process. ‘Our senior team brings extensive experience, which allows us to apply robust processes and controls while maintaining the agility and responsiveness of a growing contractor,’ says Taylor.

Where the time was going

Before ProcurePro, procurement at Apex ran the way it still runs at most main contractors. ‘Many of the processes were manual and relied on a combination of spreadsheets, emails and paper-based workflows, which inevitably created inefficiencies,’ says Taylor. 

For the surveyors doing the work, the pain was concrete. Connor Baker, a QS at Apex, remembers the internal approval process: ‘It was largely paper-based and required multiple signatories, which was challenging when teams were working across different sites.’

Every QS did procurement slightly differently. As Apex grew, that variation became a business risk.

Finding a system the surveyors would actually use

Apex had already outgrown its tooling. As Redding puts it, ‘since we have scaled, we just outgrew the early systems. We were looking around for alternatives to manage the compliance of our supply chain, and ProcurePro provided that for us.’

Redding led the research across the market. The decision came quickly. ‘We were really impressed by the simplicity and ease of use of ProcurePro,’ says Taylor. ‘It just immediately clicked.’

That simplicity mattered more than any feature list, because Apex selects systems on one criterion above all. ‘We select systems based around accessibility and the ability for the users to quickly pick them up,’ says Redding. ‘That’s the only way you’re going to get compliance and take-up.’
‍

‘We were really impressed by the simplicity and ease of use of ProcurePro. It just immediately clicked.’
Tom Taylor, Commercial Director, Apex Contractors

The simplest rollout he's seen

There was some trepidation in the commercial team about changing habits built over 10 or 15 years. It didn’t last past the first training session. ‘It’s such an intuitive process that the rollout has been the simplest I’ve seen,’ says Taylor. ‘No one has been left behind because it’s such a simple process to use.’

Redding credits the implementation support: ‘It was very slick getting it up and running. It was very easy to phase out our old processes and bring in the new platform.’

Contracts in minutes, procurement months ahead

The numbers landed fast. ‘We’re seeing a 50% to 60% improvement in putting a contract together,’ says Taylor. ‘Generally, we’re seeing procurement being brought forward by at least a couple of months on a standard project versus what we were doing.’

Baker sees the same shift at package level. ‘Manually collating interview minutes and legal documents used to take two to three hours. Now it’s completed in a matter of minutes.’ Tender addendums that used to mean rounds of emails and phone calls now take him about 5 minutes.

The platform has also strengthened governance. Apex treats the scope of works as the central reference point for each subcontract, held in a central library rather than rebuilt per project. ‘Every time we learn something, we can feed it back into the system to increase the scope of works and protect the business,’ says Taylor. Approval workflows hold until compliance documents like insurances are in place.

Both men have put BidLevel, ProcurePro’s AI bid comparison tool, to work. Taylor used it on a last-minute M&E bid before a tender adjudication: ‘I was able to upload four quotes and quickly identify key clarifications, inclusions and exclusions that would otherwise have taken several hours to analyse manually. It doesn’t complete the job; you still have to understand it, but it makes a real difference.’

Baker ran it on a dry lining package with five quotes. ‘Manually rationalising those quotes might take an hour or two, but the AI system came back in minutes, and then it was just a final sense check.’

‘ProcurePro gives us real-time visibility of procurement activity, allowing us to cross-reference progress against project reporting and keep everything aligned.’
Tom Taylor, Commercial Director, Apex Contractors

What the supply chain makes of it

Apex’s supply chain had the same early hesitation as its surveyors and got over it just as quickly. Subcontractors upload quotes and raise queries centrally instead of fielding chasing calls. ‘They like the e-signature because they get a subcontract in hand quickly, so they know they’ve won the job and can resource it,’ says Taylor.

Returns have improved with it. ‘We’ve seen improvements in the number of tenders we’re getting back and the quality of them.’

Where Apex goes next

Redding is building towards a digital operation that runs end to end, and ProcurePro fills the procurement slot in that stack. ‘One of the advantages of working with ProcurePro is we have direct access to their development team. They are able to expose the API to us, which enables us to implement our own pipelines between various pieces of software.’

Taylor’s advice for other commercial directors weighing up digital procurement: ‘The reality is that if you want greater control, visibility and efficiency in procurement, this is the direction the industry is moving.’