How To Develop An Environmental Sustainability Platform

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1 ITEM 9. FILE NO: TENDER ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY PLATFORM S TENDER NO: 1461 SUMMARY This report provides details of the tenders received for the development of the Environmental Sustainability Platform to manage and report environmental data relating to the City of Sydney Local Government Area (LGA) such as electricity, gas, water, transport, and waste. This platform is an essential tool to allow the reporting of LGA environmental performance against the stated Sustainable Sydney 2030 goals. The City has two existing environmental data collection and reporting systems to manage data for the LGA. The licence of one of these systems expires on 1 October 2015, providing an opportunity for the City to test the market. The Environmental Sustainability Platform will provide a holistic solution to the City s need to collect, store, transform, model and report LGA environmental performance data (but excluding data relating to the City s own operations). The Platform will: enable enhanced performance monitoring of ongoing and newly implemented environmental initiatives including energy from renewable sources and usage of recycled and locally generated waste water; assist in modelling data and testing scenarios for the purpose of future project identification and feasibility assessment; and provide greater reporting flexibility, including the ability for staff, community members and other stakeholders to generate reports based on criteria specified by the end user. As a member of the Rockefeller Foundation 100 Resilient Cities and C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40), the City has certain reporting obligations. Without the Environmental Sustainability Platform the City will be unable to meet these reporting obligations. To meet the City s identified needs the tender was specified in four parts. As part of the tender, the City reserved the right to mix and match the parts even if a supplier had quoted against all four parts. Parts 2 and 3 replace and provide enhancements to the existing systems. Parts 1 and 4 provide new capability and functionality. The four parts are: Part 1 Developing a data transformation methodology for resource and emissions performance data for the entire LGA attributed to sectors ( top down data) Part 2 Data collection, business rules and reporting of top down data as specified by the methodology developed in Part 1 for use by key City of Sydney staff

2 Part 3 Data collection, business rules and reporting of actual performance reporting and tracking of buildings in the Better Buildings Partnership and other City of Sydney sustainability programs ( bottom up data) for use by key City of Sydney staff Part 4 Reporting and presentation of data to the organisation and the wider community RECOMMENDATION It is resolved that: (A) Council accept the tender offer of Tenderer A for Part 1 and Part 2, D for Part 3 and B for Part 4 for the Environmental Sustainability Platform as outlined in the attached confidential Tender Evaluation Summary for a period of three years, with the option of an extension of a further two years; (B) (C) authority be delegated to the Chief Executive Officer to negotiate, execute and administer the contract relating to the tender; and authority be delegated to the Chief Executive Officer to exercise the option referred to in clause (A), if appropriate, and negotiate the price to extend the contract accordingly. ATTACHMENTS Attachment A: Tender Evaluation Summary (Confidential) (As Attachment A is confidential, it will be circulated separately from the agenda paper and to Councillors and relevant senior staff only.)

3 BACKGROUND 1. The Environmental Sustainability Platform will contain environmental data collected from a range of data suppliers for the City of Sydney Local Government Area (LGA). This data will allow City staff to: produce reports, better understand the current environmental footprint of the LGA, and test various environmental scenarios for example, projections from environmental master plans. This ability to model policy will enable City staff to make recommendations to the organisation and Council for future actions to increase environmental performance. The system will also facilitate the communication of relevant data to stakeholders via a web based interface and will provide the public with the ability to extract reports based on user-generated queries. 2. Council has established clear targets for the LGA and some key sectors within the LGA. These targets include reductions in; greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, water consumption, waste to landfill, and emissions from transport. In addition, clear targets have been set to increase; local energy generation, energy provision from renewable sources, resource recovery from waste, recycled water usage and usage of locally generated waste water. 3. It is essential that the City is able to capture and report on data relating to the targets noted above and to report on progress against these targets for our own reporting requirements, including the Green Report and reporting requirements through membership of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40). This will ensure a rigorous and well informed approach as to how the City, our residents and our businesses are progressing towards meeting the targets set by Council. 4. In addition, the system will meet the requirements of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol for Cities (GPC), which is now a requirement of reporting for C40 Cities members. The City intends to use the data contained within the Environmental Sustainability Platform to determine further actions required to meet our environmental targets and to facilitate engagement with its stakeholders, residents, workers and visitors in understanding trends, performance and motivating improvement in environmental performance. An open data platform will ensure that the City as well as selected third parties can optimise the value of the information. 5. The City is a member of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40). C40 is a network of the world s megacities committed to addressing climate change. The City contributes to eight C40 networks and reports through the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) Cities. CDP Cities is city-wide adjunct to the original CDP program which was designed for large organisations. C40 encourages its member cities to report annual emissions inventories using the common CDP Cites platform. The City has been reporting its LGA and corporate emissions under CDP Cities since it began in In addition to membership of the C40, the City is also a participant in the C40 Compact of Mayors grouping. The Compact of Mayors is the world s largest cooperative effort among mayors and city officials to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, track progress, and prepare for the impacts of climate change. 7. C40 uses the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol is the most widely used international accounting tool to assist in understanding, quantifying and managing greenhouse gas emissions. For cities, this is achieved using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol for Cities (GPC).

4 8. As a member of C40, the City is now required to follow the Greenhouse Gas Protocol for Cities when reporting against C40 initiatives. The Environmental Sustainability Platform tender required that the platform be compliant with and enable reporting using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol for Cities. This will enable the City to meet our requirements under the Compact of Mayors and other C40 initiatives. 9. Compliance with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol for Cities and production of reporting through C40 will also provide the City with an objective comparison of our environmental performance when compared with other global cities. This objective comparison will enable recognition of our progress towards both our Sydney 2030 objectives and the carbon emission reduction objectives of C Automating aspects of Greenhouse Gas Protocol for Cities reporting will significantly reduce the workload of specialist City resources. 11. In 2013 an Expression of Interest was issued to the market seeking proposals to replace the City s reporting system for organisational environmental data, the System for Tracking EVerything Environmental (STEvE) and the two systems for LGA environmental data. It became clear through this Expression of Interest that there were no service providers able to offer a system that met the City s identified needs. 12. Following the Expression of Interest, the scope of the project was refined to ensure the City s primary reporting needs for the LGA would be met and enhancements enabled. A platform for procuring environmental reporting requirements for Council s operation will be the subject of a future tender process. 13. The Environmental Sustainability Platform is being developed to be consistent with and contribute to the digital strategy concepts being formulated by the City. External users will benefit from this, as one tenant of the strategy is to provide open data, available for uses perhaps not directly relevant to the data needs of the City, but valuable to others. 14. The Environmental Sustainability Platform has been designed as a big data project, which will provide a pool of data, methods for accessing this data and the ability for City staff and the public to generate reports based on criteria specified by the user. 15. The Environmental Sustainability Platform will provide a simple, elegant and rich internet-based user interface. This will follow all relevant accessibility and other interface requirements of the City, as well as making information available through Rather than being constrained to the specific requirements of the current City of Sydney system and system users, the Environmental Sustainability Platform strives to satisfy the broadest needs of users without compromising core functionality. 17. The design of the system provides the maximum potential to grow the system to accommodate future City of Sydney programs and data requests from users. 18. This report recommends that Council accept the tender offers as outlined in the table below:

5 Recommended Tenderer A A Scope Part 1 - Developing a data transformation methodology for resource and emissions performance data for the entire LGA attributed to sectors ( top down data) Part 2 Data collection, business rules and reporting of top down data as specified by the methodology developed in Part 1 for use by key City of Sydney staff D Part 3 Data collection, business rules and reporting of actual performance reporting and tracking of buildings in the Better Buildings Partnership and other City of Sydney sustainability programs ( bottom up data) for use by key City of Sydney staff B Part 4 Reporting and presentation of data to the organisation and the wider community 19. The City currently subscribes through two separate providers to software that collects environment-related information for the LGA. This data can be characterised two ways. The first is top down data, which is broad in nature, such as overall usage data from utility companies. The second is bottom up data, which is of a finer grain and includes meter data and information from individual buildings and tenancies. 20. These subscriptions are nearing expiration, with one ceasing on 1 October The purpose of the Environmental Sustainability Platform is to replace these two systems, extend the current functionality and improve access to the information, enabling creative new uses. 21. It is anticipated that development of the Environmental Sustainability Platform will require 30 weeks, so deployment this calendar year is an optimistic estimation. 22. A Request For Tender was released to the market place, with a closing date of 16 December INVITATION TO TENDER 23. The project was advertised in The Australian newspaper on 26 November 2014 and in The Sydney Morning Herald on 25 November TENDER SUBMISSIONS 24. Submissions were received from the following 12 suppliers: Accuvio Digdeep Digital Pty Ltd Envizi Australia Pty Ltd

6 Ernst and Young Eutility Pty Ltd Institute for Sustainable Futures Kinesis Pty Ltd Managility Pty Ltd Oberix Group Pty Ltd Object Consulting Pty Ltd Socrata Inc WSP Buildings Pty Ltd 25. No late submissions were received. TENDER EVALUATION 26. All members of the Tender Evaluation Panel have signed Pecuniary Interest Declarations. No pecuniary interests were noted. 27. The relative ranking of tenders as determined from the total weighted score is provided in the Confidential Tender Evaluation Summary Attachment A. 28. All submissions were assessed in accordance with the approved evaluation criteria: (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) (h) meets functional requirements; meets non-functional requirements; financial and commercial trading integrity including insurances; the lump sum price and schedule of prices; demonstrated track record and technical ability in delivering works outline in the specification; capacity to achieve the required scope of works and project program; environmental management; and Workplace Health & Safety. PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT 29. The performance will be measured against: (a) (b) satisfaction against specified key objectives and deliverables; the quality of work;

7 (c) (d) (e) (f) time; reporting; communication; and WH&S compliance. FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS 30. There are sufficient funds allocated for this project within the current year's capital works/operating budget and future years forward. RELEVANT LEGISLATION 31. The tender has been conducted in accordance with the Local Government Act 1993, the Local Government (General) Regulation 2005 and the City s Contracts Policy. 32. Attachment A contains confidential commercial information of the tenderers and details of Council's tender evaluation and contingencies which, if disclosed, would: (a) (b) confer a commercial advantage on a person with whom Council is conducting (or proposes to conduct) business; and prejudice the commercial position of the person who supplied it. 33. Discussion of the matter in an open meeting would, on balance, be contrary to the public interest because it would compromise Council's ability to negotiate fairly and commercially to achieve the best outcome for its ratepayers. CRITICAL DATES / TIME FRAMES 34. External the licence for one of the systems currently providing a subset of the functionality required of the Environmental Sustainability Platform will run out on 1 October As the incumbent providing this system has not been successful tendering for the Environmental Sustainability Platform, an extension cannot be guaranteed. 35. External even if approval was received during the week 18 May 2015 and contract signing was achieved within a week, the scheduled duration for completion is currently 30 weeks, resulting in completion the week before Christmas. Deferring the decision may result in a lengthy delay due to key personnel from both sides being unavailable during the Christmas holiday period. OPTIONS 36. As the Environmental Sustainability Platform replaces two existing systems, provides support to at least three other programs and assists with the City s reporting requirements for C40, failure to proceed would result in a significant step backwards in the City s sustainability efforts. Additional resources would need to be applied to C40 reporting to prevent a degradation of the City s reputation in that sphere.

8 37. No viable alternatives were identified during the tender evaluation process. As the Environmental Sustainability Platform is a big data project supported by software, differences between the software offered by the suppliers were not great enough to impact on the fundamental nature of the Environmental Sustainability Platform. 38. Without the Environmental Sustainability Platform the City will not be in a position to fully understand the impacts of environmental projects implemented, nor to conduct forward planning and scenario testing. This would significantly impact on the City s ability to provide transparent, robust and timely data to stakeholders and residents, and to report progress toward the environmental goal within Sustainable Sydney PUBLIC CONSULTATION 39. No public consultation has been undertaken with the public due to the nature of the Environmental Sustainability Platform. One important aspect of the Environmental Sustainability Platform is the provision of data to the public and other interested parties, so it is anticipated that, once the system has been launched, requests for data may be received. Flexibility and scalability are being built into the system to accommodate these requests with little or no additional effort, so consultation will be more meaningful when the potential is more obvious to the public. KIM WOODBURY Chief Operations Officer Chris Derksema, Sustainability Director Kirsten Woodward, Manager Environmental Projects