United Kingdom-Reading: Billing system – Framework Lead

The current contract for Billing system – Framework Lead is projected to end on 03-OCT-19 and may be available for retender.
Description:
Title attributed to the contract by the contracting entity:: FA1226 Customer Relationship Management and Billing system (Non-household and wholesale).

Type of contract and location of works, place of delivery or of performance: Supplies
Purchase
Main site or location of works, place of delivery or of performance: Whole of Thames Water region.
NUTS code

Information on framework agreement: Framework agreement with several operators
maximum number of participants to the framework agreement envisaged: 5
Duration of the framework agreement
Duration in months: 60

Short description of the contract or purchase(s):: From 1.4.2017, non-household customers in England will have the ability to choose their water supplier and sewerage services provider. TW non-household retail and wholesale business functions will therefore be participants in the new competitive non-household water market each with their own set of market obligations and commercial requirements.
In order to be compliant with this market and to provide effective services for its customers, TW are seeking to implement new system solutions, including Customer Relationship Management and Billing (CRB) capabilities for their non-household retail business functions and for their wholesale water and waste business functions.
At this time TW has not decided whether to procure system capabilities jointly for retail and wholesale or separately for each business function. This PQQ will help to inform that decision.
The scope of this PQQ is to select the provider of the system. The system integration provider will be selected via a separate process.
The requirements for each business functions are as follows.
Non-household retail:
TW Retail require a system(s) to enable the billing and relationship management for business customers receiving water and wastewater services. Thames are seeking system(s) to deliver the following core capabilities for our Retail business:
– Prospect to sale, contract capture and account management;
– Pricing and development of products and services;
– Bill issue, order to cash, collections (accounts receivable) and payment management;
– Debt and Credit management incorporated into a billing system;
– Core customer interactions – inbound / outbound contact (queries, complaints, issue resolution) and customer data management;
– E-functionalities (e.g e-orders, e-billing, webapps capabilities, etc.) – Managing initiation of non-primary offerings: trade effluent and other value add products and services;
– Reporting, analytics and consumption/benchmarking analysis;
– Interfacing with internal corporate systems – Interfacing and reconciling with market operator;
– Purchasing of wholesale services and reconciliation of wholesale and retail charges;
– Interfacing with external market registration systems and other third parties.
It is anticipated that the system(s) will be required to calculate and bill charges for at least 250,000 customers (across at least 340,000 sites) and their associated measurement/usage data, for a number of products and services. The system needs to be flexible to meet the changing requirements of the market and scalable to support increases in customer volumes, in line with business retail market in the UK.
Wholesale:
To recover wholesale revenues from retailers in relation to the provision of commodity, network and event based services, TW wholesale are seeking system/s to deliver the following capabilities:
– Pre sales, contract and customer (retailer) management;
– Service point management, service management, service measurement (metering) and tariff management;
– Financial settlement encompassing collection of usage data (meter reads), invoicing, payments and subsequent collection (accounts receivables);
– Managing new network connections requested by developers as well as provisioning event and network based services (asset work and field services);
– Core customer interactions: handling queries, complaints, work requests and communications with customers – E-functionalities (e.g e-orders, e-billing, webapps capabilities, etc.) – Interfacing with external market registration systems and internal corporate systems – Interfacing and reconciling with market operator.
It is anticipated that the system/s will be required to calculate and bill charges on the basis of no less than 500,000 service points and their associated meter(measurement) and usage and data read, and a range of other associated network and event based services to up to 100 retail customers.
The PQQ is structured in three lots in order to allow suppliers to bid:
1) Only on the Non-household CRB system.
2) Only on the Wholesale CRB system.
3) Both on the Non-household and Wholesale CRB systems.
Please note that, for every lot, at this stage Thames Water will take into account all hosting options for the system, including (but not limited to) cloud based, on-site hardware, shared infrastructure or own infrastructure in cloud, datacentre, SaaS as well as any interim services.

Information about variants: Variants will be accepted: yes

Information about renewals: This contract is subject to renewal: no