How Ideals helps Equitix successfully manage a 12-year, £1.2 billion procurement

Overview

Founded in 2007, Equitix is a London-based equity investor and fund manager of core infrastructure projects with over 300 multidisciplinary specialists worldwide.

The company first used Ideals to share documents with competitive bidders during procurement for a short-term contract in the UK. And after being highly impressed by the platform’s efficiency, they chose the VDR to manage their next big private finance initiative.

Their Associate Director, Michael Murray, ranks the top benefits of Ideals as “First, the complete document control. Second, quick and controlled communication with all interested parties, and third, demonstrating to the city council that we are using a reliable VDR provider.”

The context

With a structured approach to investing and managing, Equitix has long been a trusted partner in public-private investments, consistently delivering solid returns and yields.

The firm has a diversified portfolio of 330 infrastructures, renewables, and real estate assets, and since 2019 has been the lead owner of a special purpose company set up to manage Birmingham’s highway maintenance contract up to 2035.

Key challenges

In 2019, the Equitix team was storing their files locally and sharing them by email or SharePoint based on specific projects’ needs. But when the time came to select an interim contractor for the Birmingham project, they realized the need for a secure platform to ensure a highly secure and efficient procurement process.

When comparing VDR providers, they focused on tools and functionalities that would provide them with the following:

• Controlled granular permissions for different stakeholders
• An in-built communications management system
• Real-time tracking of all the activities done with their data 
• Capacity to quickly upload all document formats

After making comparisons, Michael affirmed that they chose Ideals because it was “good value for money, met all the requirements, and was easy to engage with.”

Solution

After the first project’s success, the Equitix team started using Ideals to facilitate procurement of  the long-term subcontractor to maintain Birmingham’s highway network of 2,500 km of roads and more than 850 structures.

Equitix described the main benefits of using Ideals for both projects:

• “The platform setup is very simple, and the filing structure is straightforward to use and modify”
• “Bulk upload of files makes it easy to extract indexes to analyze all the uploads”
• “Q&A function allows review of all technical queries and clarifications, saving hours to track and trace emails with different parties”
• “The platform is a ready-made specific system for documents and communication”

The future

With Ideals, Equitix continues to ensure a robust risk profile while operating efficiently. Their team currently has over 80 users collaborating on over 900 documents in the VDR. 

The feedback has been universally favorable: “No training was necessary for any of the users, the customer service is excellent, a brief introduction was sufficient, and our customer success manager has been on hand ever since regarding any issues or queries,” concluded Michael.