Government Commercial Agency

The requirement

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) will improve gathering and dissemination of data, together with better information provision, leading to better informed drivers and improved journeys. In the longer term, increasing automation will enhance road safety, efficiency and reduce congestion.  The Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) have announced £100m of funding for CAV testing environments, of which Highways England is leading two projects – UK CITE and the A2/M2 Connected Corridor. The projects form part of the Department for Transport’s CAV strategy and Highways England’s Innovation Fund to help strengthen the UK as a global centre for the fast-growing intelligent mobility market, estimated to be worth £900 billion per year globally by 2025.

In order to realise the real world CAV testing on the Strategic Road Network, Highways England required a flexible resource pool of skilled and experienced experts in vehicular communications, cyber security, in-vehicle systems, traffic data management, and business models. Highways England also ensured that the contract could be utilised by Transport for London, Department for Transport and Kent County Council (its partners for the A2/M2 Connected Corridor) in order to aggregate demand.

The solution

Highways England ran a competition via Lot 12 (Traffic Management Technology Professional Services) of the Crown Commercial Service Traffic Management Technology 2 (RM1089) framework in 2017.

Highways England conducted pre-market engagement with suppliers on the framework, particularly CAV domain experts, to gain feedback on the requirements. Engineering professional services firm WSP was commissioned by Highways England to drive forward its CAV programme.

The results

The contract has a maximum contract term of 4 years and an initial contract value of circa £1.5m. Due to the scope of Contracting Authorities permitted to use the framework, Highways England was able to aggregate its demand with its other CAV project partners, resulting in reduced day rates and a reduced contract management overhead.

WSP will work closely with Highways England, the Department for Transport, and other transport authorities such as Transport for London and Kent County Council to rollout a world class ecosystem for connected and autonomous vehicles across the UK.

As part of this project, a team of specialists at WSP, supported by its supply chain partners, will provide a range of services including programme management, design of CAV technology solutions, vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure communications, system architecture design, data and cyber security solutions, trials evaluation, business case development, road safety case development, and data analysis and modelling.

Get involved

To find out more about the Traffic Management Technology 2 framework, you can:

View the framework page
Complete this online form 
Call us on 0345 410 2222

The requirement

Tunnel operations across England traditionally use Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) based systems which are managed on a localised, individual basis. To achieve significant efficiency gains, Highways England required the procurement of a scalable Tunnel Control and Management System (TCMS) which will enable the centralised control of an increasing portfolio of tunnels, starting with the Southwick and Roundhill tunnels in the South East. Highways England currently manages 13 tunnels across the UK’s Strategic Road Network.

The TCMS solution needed to be procured in a way that ensured the TCMS can grow to manage assets of this size. The estimated total number of tunnel devices across the Strategic Road Network is 5,200.

The procurement of the TCMS presented the opportunity to improve numerous aspects of a standardised tunnel control system. Therefore, the TCMS procurement required a solution to be delivered which addressed these opportunities. It needed to conforms to Open Standards, which are recognised within the UK . An open system shall deliver interfaces in a way that ensures that future development can be implemented by alternative contractors. The platform needed to be scalable in order to easily adopt additional infrastructure where required including adding or removing tunnels management and the capacity to expand beyond the South East.

Highways England also required the solution to seamlessly integrate with its traffic management systems, e.g. Common Highways Agency and Rijkswaterstaat Model (CHARM), to support the control and management of mainline and tunnel technology, and be easily accessible and user friendly for a multitude of users across different services.

The solution

Highways England ran a competition via Lot 14 (Intelligent Transport Systems) of the CCS Traffic Management Technology 2 (TMT2) framework in 2017.

Highways England conducted pre-market engagement with suppliers on the framework, particularly market leaders in the tunnel management domain, to gain feedback on the requirements. 7 tenders were received, which shows the breadth of capability available on the framework. The contract is configurable and pre-populated, therefore reducing the time taken to prepare for a competition. Consulting and technology firm Indra was commissioned by Highways England to implement their TCMS for 13 tunnels.

The results

The contract has a maximum contract term of 12 years and an initial contract value of circa €10m.

Indra will equip tunnels with its HORUS smart management platform which will be deployed in the cloud so that it can be controlled from anywhere. The solution integrates Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS) and safety systems, allowing for automated incident management. It offers operators real-time information and sees everything that occurs in the tunnel, meaning that decisions of when to turn on variable message signs to relieve congestion can be made quickly.

Get involved

To find out more about the TMT2 framework, you can:
View the framework page
Complete this online form
Call us on 0345 410 2222

The requirement

The General Optical Council (GOC) is the regulator for the optical professions in the UK. Its purpose is to protect the public by promoting high standards of education, conduct and performance amongst opticians.

The GOC’s IT department was faced with ongoing challenges around ensuring its services are accessible to its end users and that any associated data was protected and secure. This meant the majority of the GOC’s IT resource was being spent on keeping services online, backups running and that a disaster recovery plan was in place to meet the business’ service levels. The complexity of these solutions, and the disruption caused by testing them, often resulted in a drain on the GOC’s limited resources in terms of both its people and IT infrastructure.

After a full review of its IT services and strategy, the GOC made the decision to outsource the majority of its IT services. This decision was aimed at reducing and controlling costs whilst providing a more robust, secure and effective IT platform. This would in turn allow the Council’s own IT staff to focus on supporting the business and developing new and innovative ways of delivering against the GOC’s business goals.

The solution

The GOC ran a competitive process through the Crown Commercial Service Technology Services 2 (RM3804) framework for the Council’s IT managed services requirement. The framework’s tendering processes helped the GOC consider and set out its requirements in full so that suppliers had sufficient information to bid effectively.

The GOC awarded the contract to Celerity, one of Technology Services 2’s SME suppliers, after it had demonstrated its ability to provide a fully IT managed service including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Back up as a Service (BaaS), Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and IT service desk support.

Celerity’s IaaS solution means that the GOC is no longer responsible for any underlying hardware and can run its servers outside of its datacentre or on-premise where appropriate. This means the GOC does not have to invest the time required to maintain the hardware from a firmware or code level perspective and is not responsible for monitoring the hardware or raising hardware support calls where needed. Furthermore, the inherent risk around performing necessary upgrades or patches is offloaded to Celerity and any service disruption related to these elements can be avoided. As part of the GOC’s IT managed service, Celerity not only help with day-to-day IT administration tasks but it makes sure security remains a top priority through regular deployment of security patches. Celerity’s BaaS and DRaaS services also ensures the GOC’s data is fully protected and highly available to meet agreed service levels for ongoing business continuity.

The results

The GOC now has an infrastructure which is secure, fully compliant and resilient allowing for longer-term business planning to be achieved. Through its breadth of experience and professional IT services Celerity will achieve more efficient cost management and is now a trusted partner working alongside the Council to further enhance its business processes. As the costs are opex costs with no upfront hardware or infrastructure investments this ensures that the GOC has known and fixed costs for the duration of the contract.

Mark Webster, Director of Resources at the GOC, commented:

“Moving our IT services to Celerity gives us a robust and cost-effective solution that allows us to provide better customer service both internally and externally to the public and to the opticians we regulate. The transfer of our services to Celerity ran smoothly and we are finding them easy and professional to work with”.

By tendering through the Technology Services 2 RM3804 commercial agreement, the GOC has secured a contract with a quality assured supplier using rigorous, pre-defined contractual terms. The resulting contract with Celerity has achieved the following additional benefits:

• Services are running on a more robust infrastructure utilising up to date technologies
• More confidence in the back-up solution and the ability to provide disaster recovery
• Disaster recovery testing without the risk, disruption or workload previously associated with it
• Increased staff productivity with a focus on the business and time to plan for future business needs
• Reduced costs and more efficient cost management
• Enhanced security and compliance
• Access to Celerity’s expertise allowing risk to be shared and reduced

Get involved

To find out more about the Technology Services 2 framework, you can:

View the framework page
Complete this online form
Call us on 0345 410 2222

Customer:

Department of Education

Supplier:

SmartSurvey Limited

Contract Description

The Department for Education had a number of colleagues using a US-based survey platform but needed a UK-based alternative which meets the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduced in 2018. SmartSurvey stores data in the UK, is GDPR compliant and holds ISO27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus certification.

Contract delivery area:

UK-wide

Contract value for SME:

£124,000

Contract details

CCS Framework through which business was won:

G-Cloud 9

Supplier Factfile

SME:

SmartSurvey Limited

CEO:

Mo Naser

What the company does:

SmartSurvey is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that helps individuals, charities, businesses and government organisations by simplifying the collection of data through the power of the web. It is used in consultations, customer satisfaction, employee feedback, assessments, academic research, training evaluation, and much more. SmartSurvey offers a dedicated personal service to its customers and, importantly, stores data in the UK.

Company HQ:

Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire

Website:

https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk

Social Media:

Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Annual turnover of company:

£2 million+

Number of employees:

16

Type of SME:

Small

Supplier Experience

In relation to the contract awarded, how did you find the procurement process?

We found the procurement process very straightforward. Crown Commercial Service has taken feedback from suppliers like us, who only have small teams, to make the process simple. Unlike big organisations, we don’t have dedicated staff to manage procurement processes, so we had to learn from scratch. But the G-Cloud framework gave us a way to sell our services to the Department for Education from a single, central website. We started off on G-Cloud 5, so we’ve seen how it has evolved over the years and can say that G-Cloud 9, which we used here, was by far the simplest framework to use.

What worked well and what could have been done better?

The simplicity of going through the call-off contract which we received from the client worked really well, as did having everything we needed to know laid out clearly in front of us. It also helped that the client had previous experience dealing with G-Cloud orders. The process was much easier than we expected it to be.

What benefit does your company receive from supplying to the public sector?

As a small UK company, the biggest benefit of supplying to the public sector is that it gives us the opportunity to help improve our country. We feel as though we are contributing to making our public services more efficient through the services we provide.

The experience we’ve gained by learning new things along the way has paid dividends. For example, we now know a lot more about the structure within central and local government, which helps us plan out our marketing efforts. Working with the public sector has also given us a lot of confidence to sell to the private sector. We now have many public sector customers and this really gives us an edge and makes us stand out from the crowd. Many private companies feel more assured to work with us as a result of successfully delivering projects to government departments.

What was/is/will be the outcome of the contract for the client?

The Department for Education can now feel confident they used a UK-based, secure and compliant tool to create online surveys and forms.

Furthermore, the contract has allowed the Department to consolidate its spend on such online tools by purchasing an Enterprise account, where they can add more licences as and when they wish, at a fixed price.

How would you like to work with the public sector in the future?

In the same way we do now. It works well, so there’s no need to change anything now we are on G-Cloud 10. G-Cloud has already proved to be successful for us, even though it only recently went live. We already have over £100k worth of business due to go through G-Cloud 10 in the coming weeks.