Southern Water has published advance information for the supply chain about its upcoming £358 million Technology Services Partner Framework for AMP8 ahead of going out to tender in September 2023.

The water company is going to market for strategic partners to become part of the Technology Service Partner Framework Agreement to deliver IT services including:

• Strategy & Architecture
• Software Engineering
• Application Support
• Maintenance & Operations
• Resource Augmentation (inc. Business Process, Infrastructure) and other ancillary services

The tender process is likely to be a two-stage negotiated procedure with a prior call for competition to set up a Technology Service Partner Framework Agreement lasting 4 years, with an option to extend for a period of up to 4 years.

Goods and Services which successful bidders will be asked to provide under this agreement is currently split across 8 Lots. Bidders will be eligible to apply for one or more of the available lots. The Lots are currently as listed below:

1 Digital & Technical Services

2 Corporate System Services

3 Operational Technology Services

4 Enterprise Information Management

5 Data & Analytics

6 Strategy & Architecture

7 Quality & Process Services

8 Infrastructure

Southern Water reserves the right to update the Lot structure and scope at the release of the formal contract notice for the Technology Services Partner Framework. Lots can be awarded as single or multiple lots to one or more tenderers.

The Periodic Indicative Notice includes an extensive amount of background information on work Southern Water has carried out during AMP7 and its priorities going forward into AMP8.

Commenting on its digital systems and services, Southern Water said it had an aged digital technology platform and that AMP7 has focused on replacing most of the digital platforms with heavy focus on new age technologies. The service portfolio has involved building a new integration platform and rolling it out across the estate. AMP7 priorities included:

1. Digitise health and safety

2. Enhance environment / waste / wholesale digital capabilities

3. Enhance water digital capabilities

4. Customer digitisation

5. Other business driven spend / digitisation

In terms of corporate system services, AMP7 priorities have included continuous investment in corporate technologies, including enterprise applications like SAP, Success factors and Workday. Going forward, key activities include delivery of continuous improvements to existing and future applications used for enterprise-wide support services and AMP8 ERP software selection exercise support.

As an asset intensive organisation, for operational technology services the focus of AMP7 has been on a full reimplementation and replacement of Asset and GIS systems.

With regard to data and analytics, the focus in AMP7 was on data warehousing / lake, data integration, data analytics and development of business intelligence software and information reporting tools.

Going forward, key activities include data manipulation, data visualisation, machine learning, deep learning, scenario analysis, forecasting / prediction, planning and Azure.

For infrastructure, Southern Water will require services related to the design, development, integration, operation, implementation, maintenance, and support of a range of infrastructure technologies (networks, servers and storage, cloud, telephony, etc.)

Services to be delivered will be supporting key infrastructure, including routers, firewalls, databases, client systems, security services, network management, servers, switches, cabling, storage, backup technology, network infrastructure, telecoms and connectivity.

Click here to access the Periodic Indicative Notice documentation.