UK Public Sector Contracts & Tenders

Northern Ireland Water is responsible for the supply and distribution of drinking water and the provision of sewerage services for approximately 840,000 domestic, agricultural and business customers across Northern Ireland. Background and Context NI Water has an established Digital Services platform that underpins high volume, customer facing and internal services, supporting both external users and staff across multiple directorates. The current Digital Services platform comprises: • a public facing customer self service portal, and • an enterprise case management and workflow solution, integrated with a range of legacy and modern systems supporting operational, financial and regulatory processes. The existing contract for the delivery of these services is approaching expiry. NI Water therefore intends to undertake a competitive procurement to appoint a delivery partner to provide ongoing support, maintenance, transition and enhancement services, and to enable the platform to evolve in line with future business needs. Nature of the Requirement The appointed supplier will be expected to support a live, business critical platform, ensuring continuity of service while enabling controlled change and improvement. The scope of services is expected to include (high level summary): • Application support and maintenance • Incident, defect and service request management • Transition and knowledge transfer activities at contract commencement • Fixed price, milestone based enhancement delivery • Release, change and testing management in line with NI Water governance • Information governance, cyber security and regulatory compliance • Performance reporting and participation in governance forums Further detail will be provided during the formal procurement process. Future Direction NI Water intends to deliver a rolling programme of enhancements over the life of the contract, prioritised in line with business need, funding approval and governance. NI Water’s objective is to work with a supplier that can: • take over and operate a live enterprise digital estate with minimal disruption, and • support the continuous, controlled evolution of the platform over the contract term.

NI Water is responsible for the supply and distribution of drinking water and the provision of sewage services for approximately 818,000 domestic, agricultural and business customers throughout Northern Ireland. Our water infrastructure extends to 27,200km of mains which is supplied by 24 WTWs. Since 2012, NI Water has reported leakage utilising a recognised Leakage Management Software (LMS) system whose calculations meet OFWAT regulatory and the UK water industry best practice requirements. NI Water are approaching the market to identify providers of LMS systems that can assist us in delivering robust leakage calculations, data analytics, leakage targeting and reporting. Due to the approaching expiration of NI Water’s current LMS system in March 2028, NI Water requires a provider to supply, embed, support, maintain & develop the software, its component applications and its internal/external data system integrations. A condition of the new LMS contract is to ensure a seamless transition of calculating and reporting company reconciled leakage from financial year April-2027 / March-2028 into financial year April-2028 / March-2029 and onward. To meet this condition: • the provider must supply, embed & support their LMS system which will require robust integrations with various internal NI Water data systems and other external data suppliers. • the provider’s LMS system must be embedded to allow for the parallel running of business-as-usual data inputs, data analysis and reporting alongside NI Water’s current LMS system for the financial period April-2027 / March-2028. A second condition of the new LMS contract is that the calculations and reporting within LMS meets regulatory OFWAT reporting requirements, adheres to UK water industry best practice guidance and will develop to meet new and evolving UK water industry best practice guidance and innovations. It is envisaged that the contract award expiry could extend to March 2040. Although our current LMS system is on-premises, it is envisaged that the new LMS contract will be provisioned as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Data-as-a-Service (Daas) solution. The provider will be required to support and maintain all LMS databases, to provide specialist application support with the vision to develop & enhance NI Water’s leakage reporting and targeting capability. NI Water intends to undertake Pre Market Engagement on 23rd and 24th July. We would welcome confirmation from suppliers that they would like to be involved in this exercise. We would like suppliers to attend these sessions and present on your proposed solution. To this end could you please advise Marie Bradley (marie.bradley@niwater.com) by Friday 4th July if you wish to attend . We will then arrange individual sessions with suppliers for the above dates. These sessions can be via Teams or face to face. Please indicate if you have a preference.