Ashley Hamlin, our Bid and Implementation Manager shares her experience of our first lockdown tender process.

With everyone in the industry needing to adapt and change, so have many of the internal processes in Premium Credit, not least our tender process. A couple of weeks ago, we successfully submitted our tender response to a large insurance partner. Running our tender process through lockdown brought not only new challenges for our team, but new unexpected advantages as well. Throughout this lockdown, we have had virtual meetings and remote working group sessions developing our tender response, live time together using teams and screen sharing. At first, this was quite a change for our team, normally all gathering in our meeting rooms together to now sitting in our working spaces in our own homes speaking through Microsoft Teams. At first our meetings started polite and trying not to speak over each other making it hard to get momentum. This quickly changed to the team fully adapting to the new way of working, fully enthused and focused on getting the task done. Working in this virtual way has meant that we have had fewer distractions than we would in the office making our working group more focused than before, resulting is the team producing another fantastic tender response.

Further to this, we have had a new team member join the group not long before we entered lockdown. Howard Banks, our new Graphics and Motion Designer, has been a warmly welcomed addition to the team. Specialising in InDesign, he very quickly got to up to speed with our tender process and was an integral part of every meeting, live time showing our response and making updates as the team worked through the flow of the document. 

Whilst the way we once worked seems a thing of the past, as always, the teams at Premium Credit have continued to rise to new challenges and work together to produce high standards of work together for our partners.