Scottish Water is at the start of a transitional journey focusing on developing “cost intelligence” capabilities throughout the business, enabling Scottish Water to truly understand its costs and transform data into knowledge upon which Scottish Water act.

“Costing Tools” is one of the workstreams forming part of the wider cost intelligence strategy and will be one of the key enablers in facilitating the realisation of cost intelligence for the business.

There is a requirement to ensure fit for purpose costing tools that support cost intelligence across the business.

The term costing tool relates to all the tools currently used to provide costing services and currently includes:

— the Engineering Estimating System (EES), which is used to capture and analyse detailed pricing information for bottom up estimating,

— the Project Estimating Form (PEF) which is used for top down pricing,

— the Whole Life Cost (WLC) tool which is used to provide the whole life costs for the lifetime of an asset, which includes all maintenance costs,

— the Engineering Statistical Services Ltd (ESSL) tool which is used to generate algorithms and cost curves,

— other tools — mainly custom tools which are spreadsheet based — are used for business plan pricing, efficiency validation and other analytical outputs.

The essential activities required to effectively manage Scottish Water assets by providing the mechanism for all pricing requirements as well as providing more robust estimates will not be sustainable using our existing suite of costing tools.

The costing tools system(s) will use data from a variety of sources. Outturn cost data and actual cost incurred data sourced from suppliers (both internally and externally) will be required to be stored/accessed by the costing tools. Additionally, cost information from sources including framework suppliers, outturn cost data from small scale interventions and offsite modular treatment plants, will require to be input into a system which will facilitate our understanding of these costs. As well as this more “standard” information, the data required to create effective benchmarks, efficiency measures and optimal cost models needs to be both managed and analysed effectively using the right tools.

A supplier is sought to provide a proprietary yet configurable “off-the-shelf” solution or, a proprietary and configurable solution framework. More than one supplier may be contracted to provide various elements of the solution.

Contracted suppliers will be required to collaborate with SW, and possibly other suppliers, in the implementation and integration of the software.

Contracted suppliers will be required to provide on-going maintenance for the software they have provided.