Thames Water has gone out to tender with a major Technology and Transformation Alliance contract which could be worth as much as £1.1 billion over a 14 year period covering AMP6 through to AMP8.
The water company is looking to procure a single service provider to form a Technology and Transformation Alliance with Thames Water in order to deliver the core Information Technology/Operational Technology (IT/OT) requirements for the remainder of AMP6 across its entire business.
The successful supplier will work with Thames Water to deliver a step change in delivery of all scope - current preference is to award the contract to a single successful bidding consortium.
The contract will also have the potential to extend the arrangements to the AMP7 and AMP8 periods respectively. It could also bring in 1 or more other items of potential future scope by agreement at any point in the contract.
Any agreement awarded would be on the basis of a pre-service delivery phase, currently envisaged at 3 months from the beginning of January 2016 to the end of March 2016 leading into a 4 year + 5 year + 5 year contract into AMP7 and AMP8 respectively, to a maximum term of 14 years and 3 months.
The final contract (or parts of it) will be capable of transfer by Thames Water to any member of the Group on a group re-structuring.
Thames currently envisages that the scope of the contract will cover a partial or full and complete end-to-end service for a wide range of activities for the following:
- Elements of Technology (IT/OT) project delivery, development, support, maintenance, system integration, hosting and other IT services for new or legacy software, systems, processes, infrastructure, and other assets.
- Enterprise architecture planning
- Data management and information management
- Data warehousing and analytical reporting
- Programme and project management;
- System integration
- Business continuity management and IT/OT disaster recovery management;
- Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) design, implementation and management;
- Control/automation assets e.g. programmable logic controllers, remote telemetry units;
- Instrumentation installation and integration with SCADA systems.
The contract covers core service areas including:
- Asset infrastructure management and planning;
- Asset and network operations management (e.g. integration of Information Technology and Operational Technology);
- Customer experience management (e.g. marketing, selling, serving and satisfaction);
- Geospatial referencing services;
- Integrated analytics and insight for customers, assets and operations;
- Supply chain management and planning (e.g. purchase-to-pay value chain)
Services required under the contract are split across 2 areas: Core Scope and Potential Future Scope.
Core Scope
The core scope includes:
A. Service Integration: Provision of service design, service transition, service operation, cross-tower integration and continual service improvement.
B. Service Desk: Provision of incident management, problem management, user contact management, and request fulfilment.
C. Hosting: Provision of the fully maintained operational premises, the storage and processing capacity, the management and maintenance of the hardware, the build and provision of the operating environment to support the hosted applications and any required appliances plus including the provision or brokering of new potential services such as ‘cloud’ based applications and/or services and/or infrastructure (e.g. software as a service, platform as a service, infrastructure as a service).
D. Network: Provision of IT networks services for voice and data connectivity, fixed and mobile.
E. End-User-Computing
F. Applications Management
G. Applications Development
H. SCADA: Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition design, implementation and management.
I. Instrumentation installation and integration with SCADA systems.
J. Projects and Programmes including Intelligence Hub (a programme of IT and OT projects focusing on analytics and performance) and CRMB (customer relationship management and billing systems).
Potential Future Scope
The future potential scope includes:
K. Business Consulting: Provision of management and business consulting, strategy consulting, change management, transformation, and cultural change.
L. Procurement: Provision of strategic sourcing, category management, tendering, contract formulation, award and, contract management.
M. Logistics, Fleet Management and Inventory Management: Provision of vehicle planning and scheduling, vehicle tracking, work-flow, notifications, and optimisation of inventory.
N. Facilities: Provision of the integration and management of processes to maintain and develop the agreed services which support the organisation.
O. Purchase-to-Pay: Provision of the complete purchasing cycle to ensure a seamless process from need to payment.
P. Human Resources and Payroll: Provision of the management and administration of employees and associated records.
Q. Finance and Reporting: Provision of financial management and support, financial reporting, and associated activities.
R. Energy and Carbon Management: Provision of the procurement, management, monitoring and reporting of activities associated with energy and carbon management.
S. Customer Contact Centre: Provision of voice and non-voice services relating to customer management, inbound and outbound phone calls, account management, connections/ disconnections, customer exceptions, channel integration, reporting, analytics, and management information.
The total value (including all Thames Water costs) of the Core Scope items A to J above is put at between approximately £400 million to £500 million over the remainder of AMP6 following the contract award (i.e. end of March 2016 to end of March 2020) - the scope value is an approximate forecast for future AMP periods.
Total value (including all Thames Water costs) of the Future Potential Scope items K to S is approximately £200 million to £300 million per AMP period. However, Thames Water said that no decision has yet been made regarding if and when this scope will be awarded , either in total or in part.
Bidders will be expected to be able to deliver all the Core Scope items as a minimum.
Currently envisaged that bidding entities will be multi-disciplinary in nature
The size and complexity of the core IT/OT programme, and the potential to bring in the Potential Future Scope, means that it is currently envisaged that bidding entities will be multi-disciplinary in nature and will be either an incorporated or unincorporated bidding consortium.
According to the tender, a significant amount of collaboration, knowledge sharing, and innovation will take place during the lifetime of the contracts and this requirement, along with the commercial model being developed, will require a bidding consortium with significant collective capacity and capability.
The operating model selected for delivering the services is a client-embedded alliance, where Thames Water and the successful bidding consortium work together in a joint team.
Any agreement awarded would be on the basis of a pre-service delivery phase, currently envisaged at 3 months from the beginning of January 2016 to the end of March 2016 leading into a 4 year + 5 year + 5 year contract into AMP7 and AMP8 respectively, to a maximum term of 14 years and 3 months.
Time limit for final receipt of tenders or requests to participate is 20th October but interested suppliers will need to notify Thames Water of their intent to respond to the Selection Questionnaire and information, together with intended consortium entity company names by 9.00am on 6th October.
Click here to access the tender documentation.
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