OXFORD, England, May 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Commerce Decisions, a leading provider of software and services to support through-life procurement and delivery processes, has been selected by the recently announced Blackburn with Darwen and Bolton Council partnership to support the procurement process behind their multi-million pound investment in schools.

Bolton and Blackburn with Darwen councils have teamed up to work together on the next stages of The Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme which was launched by the Government in 2004 and aims to rebuild or remodel every secondary school across the UK. The partnership will focus on the task of finding private sector partners to rebuild or remodel nine schools on eight school sites in Blackburn with Darwen and 17 schools in Bolton.

"We selected Commerce Decisions to work with us on our BSF programme based on their extensive experience of working on a wide range of BSF and BSF related projects. The combination of their deep understanding and knowledge about large and complex public sector procurements coupled with AWARD software capabilities is very compelling. AWARD's rich functionality and inherent flexibility will allow us to tailor it easily to match the BSF Programme processes," commented Lisa Bibby, BSF Project Director, Blackburn with Darwen Council.

The AWARD software is a collaborative web-based software solution designed specifically to support the strategic procurement process from Request for Information preparation, through proposal evaluation to negotiation, delivery and post contract review. AWARD is proven to reduce time to contract, improve value for money and reduce risk. It has been used to support strategic procurements in a range of commercial and public sectors including utilities, transport, local government, healthcare, aerospace and defence. These procurements cover a broad range of activities including the provision of schools, hospitals, transport and defence systems across Europe and the US.

"We are very pleased to have been selected by the Blackburn and Darwen and Bolton Council partnership to support them on their collaborative BSF Programme. We know from all the experience we have gained working on numerous BSF projects that these are very challenging procurements with complex competitive dialogue phases. AWARD software has repeatedly proven itself as being more than capable of supporting projects of this nature," observed John Thompson, CEO, Commerce Decisions.

Web: http://www.commercedecisions.com

For further information contact: Guy Tarring, Tel: +44-1865-781350, Email: guy.tarring@commercedecisions.com