21
May 12

Grumeti Reserves, Tanzania

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Hospitality Procurement Delivers for Grumeti Reserves, Tanzania

Hospitality Procurement and its parent company Consolidated Procurement were awarded the procurement contract for Grumeti Reserves. This project involved working with an International Architectuarl Firm in the UK, and Interior Design Company based in Kenya and a Construction Company in dar es Salaam. The logistical challenges were immense, as every piece of equipment had to be transported across the Serengeti, mainly by road. You can imagine shipping large plate glass windows by road during the rainy season from Dar es Salaam all the way to Grumeti and ensuring they arrived in one piece. We used two international ports, Mombasa and Dar es Salaam, and managed supplies coming from all regions of the world. Furniture from Indonesia and Kenya, industrial kitchens from South Africa, antiques from the USA and Britain, lighting from Germany… the list was endless.

“The tricky part of the logistics was to ensure that equipment and products arrived in the correct sequence as there were limited storage facilities on site. We must remember that the site was in the middle of the bush and wildlife had priority. I remember seeing a herd of curious elephants walking up to the tennis courts as professional tennis court contractors from Australia were laying the courts,” says Eric Klein, Managing Director.

Another key element in the project was to source the best suppliers at all price points and find qualified sources who could meet the design and operational requirements whilst at the same time providing extremely competitive pricing. Many of these key suppliers are now our main source of products for new clients. The experience of delivering on this project enables us to tap into this key resource when working with Project Managers, Interior Designers and Builders upstream of the traditional Hospitality Procurement scope. The construction team on site that urgently required tractor tyres or another generator were able to turn to us and leave this problem aside while concentrating on their time-line schedules. This was definitely a bonus in the critical stages of completing the build. Hospitality Procurement, with its parent company Consolidated Procurement, is not only faced with budget challenges, but challenges of all types on every job. Having the expertise and experience of working in Africa on projects small and large enables us to “cut our cloth” to meet the challenges of a wide range of client profiles from boutique hotels in Nairobi to the tented camps of the Serengeti, Mara and other regions.