Engineering Services
From environmental services to seabed surveys, scaffolding to electrical testing, the range of goods and services National Grid purchases for its engineering function is as diverse as it is challenging. Project budgets range from £100k to £20 million.
Supporting stakeholders in departments within the UK Transmission and UK Distribution areas of the business, typical categories include Electrical, Maintenance, Mechanical and Repair Services; Surveying and Inspection Services; Electrical & Instrumentation Project Services and E& I Works; and Other Engineering Services such as Engineering Consultancy.
Major Projects
Projects worth in excess of £100 million are managed by the Major Projects team, specialists in sourcing, managing and delivering high-profile, high-value, highly complex contracts. These may come from any part of the business but are most often in construction or engineering. They include gas transmission systems, tunnels, interconnectors, offshore transmission, and carbon capture and storage.
Electricity & Core Construction
Responsible for a wide variety of works categories critical to asset replacement or new connection activities on both our electricity and gas transmission networks, this team is involved in procurement for capital projects such as new substations or overhead line builds. Categories include civils, mechanical installation, gas pipelines, buildings and demolition.
Core Products
The Core Products teams focus on services and products that are fundamental to our engineering and infrastructure operations for electricity and gas transmission. These include cable supply and cable installation, design works, jointing, switching gear, civils and trenching as well as pipes, valves and fittings. Procurement professionals working within this division are likely to come from technical or engineering backgrounds.
UK Indirect
UK Indirect teams procure goods or services that are not specific to particular business areas. They include professional services, own-use energy, stationery, travel and accommodation, telecommunications and fleet services – everything in fact from insurance to printer ink. These shared services allow anyone in any part of the business to order routine business items. Analysing and then exploiting economies of scale are clearly fundamental within the operation of this team.
Fleet
The Fleet Services team is responsible for delivering a range of goods and services to support the company's commercial vehicle and car fleets. This includes vehicles, plant, ancillary equipment and fleet management services. The fleet category spend is currently in the region of £50m per annum and supports 3,300 commercial vehicles, 1,800 items of wheeled plant and 2,800 cars.
IS & Telecoms
From upgrading call centres to equipping engineers with telemetry systems, enabling video conferencing to keeping our employees in touch when they're on the move, National Grid has a diverse range of information and communication needs. Working between the US and the UK, this team sources a range information services and telecoms technology including fixed and wireless voice and data solutions, radio and paging services, SCADA and associated telemetry services and computer security. They manage an annual budget worth up to £60m.