it digital contracts

**This is not a tender exercise*** The Education Authority Northern Ireland (EANI) would like to invite participation in a Preliminary Market Engagement (PME) exercise to seek the views of the market for the provision, in the first instance, of a Catering System within Northern Ireland schools, supporting modern, secure and efficient payment methods and managing risks associated with special diets within schools. The purpose of this PME exercise is for EANI to gain an understanding of the latest developments and innovative solutions available for school settings and will be used to assist EANI in gaining a better understanding of the feasibility of the requirements, the most appropriate procurement and operational approach, the capacity of the market to deliver the requirements and an opportunity for the market to highlight any possible risks or issues. This PME exercise also seeks to identify indicative costs to help inform the business case on the commercial aspects for the delivery and implementation of solution(s). For the avoidance of doubt, this is the scoping phase of the project and is not part of any formal procurement process and there is no commitment at this stage to carry out such a process. Any information gathered will not be considered in any future tender exercise. Please note that participation or non-participation in this PME exercise shall not prevent any supplier from participating in any future procurement process, nor is it intended that any information provided shall place any supplier at an advantage or disadvantage in any future procurement exercise. Further information including the questionnaire can be downloaded from the documents section of the CfT on eTendersNI. Suppliers who wish to participate in the PME exercise must return the completed questionnaire via the messaging function of the CfT on eTendersNI no later than 15:0 on Friday 29th May 2026. As part of the PME exercise, participants may be invited to attend a follow-up session with EANI to explore and discuss the information provided in their response, this will be at the discretion of EANI. For reference, the eTendersni reference number for this PME exercise is 6527440

The Contract scope covers: 1 Business-as-usual support and maintenance for the live Digital Services platform 2 An initial defined enhancement phase (Digital Version 2) 3 The potential for further governance-approved enhancements over the contract term. Support and Maintenance Services The Contract includes the provision of support and maintenance services for the Digital Services platform across the contract term. This includes application support for customer facing and staff facing services, incident, problem, and defect management, ongoing maintenance of platform components and integrations, routine release support, minor service requests necessary to keep the platform safe, stable and effective in operation and knowledge retention appropriate to a live business-critical environment. NI Water’s operational teams perform first-line support, identifying and triaging incoming incidents, supported by established monitoring and documented runbooks. Suppliers should understand that support and maintenance activity will need to operate within NI Water’s established service management processes and involve collaboration with NI Water teams through diagnosis, resolution and controlled release of fixes. Specific service levels and service management arrangements will be defined at ITT stage. 4.2 Enhancement Delivery The Contract includes an initial defined enhancement phase (Digital Version 2) together with the potential for further governance-approved enhancement activity over the contract term. NI Water maintains a prioritised list of potential enhancements for the Digital Services platform. Items on this list have undergone varying degrees of assessment and categorisation and some have progressed through discovery and design. As part of this procurement, a prioritised set of enhancements referred to as Digital Version 2 will be included as a defined programme of work under the Contract. Digital Version 2 comprises the highest-priority items currently selected from NI Water’s enhancement list. NI Water will issue the relevant design and delivery artefacts to shortlisted Suppliers at ITT stage to inform pricing. Further enhancement activity may be commissioned under the Contract over time, subject to governance, business case approval, prioritisation, and funding decisions. No commitment is given that any such additional enhancement activity will be commissioned. Any such work will be commissioned under the Contract through governance-approved Statements of Work.