Scottish Climate Intelligence Service

Background

The Improvement Service (IS) is the national improvement organisation for local government in Scotland.  It works alongside local authorities to provide transformational change, performance and improvement support, data and intelligence services and digital public services.

The IS approached Scotland Excel’s Flexible Procurement Service in October 2023 with a view to procuring a data platform to support the Scottish Climate Intelligence Service (SCIS) programme. The programme was being jointly delivered by the IS, the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute (ECCI) and the Sustainable Scotland Network (SSN). The data platform would be available to all 32 Scottish local authorities to help them design, manage and deliver effective programmes of area-wide emissions reductions.

Overview

The IS engaged Scotland Excel under our ‘hosted’ model, which allows clients to hand over specific procurement exercises to be managed from start to finish.

The IS and ECCI had undertaken a significant amount of market research and engagement prior to contacting Scotland Excel and had formed an overview brief which outlined the key requirements of the platform.  The Flexible Procurement Service worked alongside representatives from both the IS and ECCI to develop a full specification, featuring 38 important and 16 desirable functional requirements.  Scotland Excel then began work with key stakeholders to establish the scale of the project in terms of how many end users would require training and how many licenses would be needed in order to form a sound commercial approach that would achieve best value.

What we did

 The Flexible Procurement Service issued a Prior Information Notice (PIN) via the Public Contracts Scotland (PCS) portal to gather information about companies who may wish to bid for this contract. 30 companies recorded an interest.   The service then met with representatives from a number of these companies who provided vital input which helped to shape the procurement. The tender attracted 77 expressions of interest and 18 questions from prospective bidders. By the deadline for submissions three bids had been received.

Scotland Excel delivered technical evaluation training to all technical panel members to make sure a fair and transparent evaluation took place. The technical evaluation focused not only on the functional requirements of the system but the following, vital aspects of the contract:

• Implementation: considering how the recommended provider would work along with SCIS to roll out the system and assessing their approach to user adoption given the wide range of stakeholders who would be accessing the system.
• System Maintenance:  considering the available technical support and how the successful provider would address disaster recovery, and deal with system upgrades.
• Training: given the significance of the platform, which would potentially be utilized by hundreds of users this question focused on how the successful provider would deliver training in the initial phase, ongoing training and training resources which would be available to users.

Following the evaluation, two companies were invited to deliver online presentations of their proposed solutions to the evaluation panel. Whilst the presentations were not scored, they provided bidders with the opportunity to demonstrate ownership of their tender and gave the panel the chance to verify their interpretation of the bidders’ written submissions. The Flexible Procurement Service moderated the presentations to ensure that no additional information was introduced at this stage.

Outcome

After a full evaluation that was moderated by the Flexible Procurement Service, ClimateView AB Limited were awarded the contract which will run for 12 months with the option to extend for a further two 12-month periods.

Whilst delivering a platform which met all 54 functional requirements, ClimateView AB also delivered an implementation plan, which included a complete training programme tailored to a ‘train the trainer’ approach and a robust maintenance and support service.

Thorough market engagement and technical input from SCIS resulted in a robust specification and clear statement of requirements being developed, combined with an astute procurement approach from the Flexible Procurement Service, resulted in the contract being awarded to a supplier capable of meeting the requirements of SCIS and delivered within the available funding.

This successful procurement delivered a platform that will ultimately support local government emissions reduction and the national drive for Net Zero.

Progress to date

The platform training programme began in September 2024 with over 100 participants to date representing all 32 local authorities. Each local authority area has a dashboard to which inventory data has been added, with work now underway to add interventions from existing local authority plans and strategies. The platform can then help inform decision making and drive action to tackle climate change by local government and its partners. 

Testimonial

The team from SCIS who were involved in the procurement process said:

"It was useful and beneficial to have the support of Scotland Excel’s Flexible Procurement Service to take us through what can be quite a complicated process.  We really benefited from the guidance in the development of the specification and in the assessment of submitted tenders.  As a result, the procurement process was smooth, and we felt supported throughout with the best possible outcome for the programme and funding."