DIO SME Supplier Event

Venue – DMS Whittington, Lichfield WS14 9PY

Suppliers – 18 of DIO’s Tier 1 Suppliers in attendance (Construction, TSPs Hard & Soft FM)

Attendees – 100 SME spaces available

Registration – by emailing: DIOComrcl-PGSRMTeam@mod.gov.uk

Through DIO, suppliers provide a range of infrastructure services to the Ministry of Defence. By value, we rely on our suppliers to deliver 95% of our infrastructure services.

This event will help to ensure DIO is pursuing and aiming to reach as much of the market as possible, increasing competition and achieving our corporate objective of making it easier to do business with DIO. It will also contribute to DIO creating a more transparent procurement environment/process and emphasise that DIO are actively seeking to encourage new suppliers and entrants, including small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to maximise innovation opportunities.

As part of MOD’s new SME Action Plan, DIO’s Corporate Social Responsibility, DIO’s Commercial Strategy and the DIO Corporate Plan & Business Plan, which articulates the direction and guidance for achieving DIO’s key deliverables, key priorities and allocated resources/managing outputs for 2020-2030, there is an over-arching commitment to improve engagement with SMEs.

DIO seeks to utilise this breadth of potential suppliers to create a more diverse and inclusive portfolio of suppliers as well as a more robust supply chain, two integral factors to highlight and connect into the wider government objectives on support, sustainability and growth.  We are pursuing a more collaborative working relationship with and between market players of all sizes in order to develop and mature the understanding of our broad supply chains, ensuring DIO, our Prime Suppliers and SME’s are encouraged of opportunities at all levels of business.

The Meet the Buyer event is currently the platform driving this potential and objective. The aim of the event is to attract potential new suppliers to DIO, support the development of business relationships with DIO and assist SME’s in becoming a defence supplier. It will allow DIO to engage directly with SME’s to raise awareness of DIO’s procurement pipeline and introduce recently recruited Category Managers.