Southern Water to drink up tech deals worth up to £358M

Southern Water — the £792 million ($996 million) UK utility business — is on the hunt for technology suppliers to take part in a £358 million ($450 million) framework deal which includes help selecting and implementing a replacement for its current SAP ERP system.

The deal is under the water company's Technology Service Partner Framework Agreement, which is set to last four years, with an option to extend for another four-year period. The total value is only indicative utility is not bound to spend all of the £358 million figure with successful suppliers.

Details of the procurement are published in a pre-competition notice, which says suppliers can compete for eight lots, including digital and technical services, corporate system services, operational technology services, enterprise information management, data and analytics, strategy and architecture, quality and process services, and infrastructure.

Under the description for corporate systems services, the notice outlines plans for the current and future asset management period set out by regulator Ofwat.

The current AMP7 started in 2020 and ends in 2025, during which Southern Water is looking for “continuous investment in the corporate technologies which include enterprise applications like SAP, Success factors and Workday.”

It is also looking for implementation services for new ERP solution supporting the customer services, finance and procurement. In the next five-year investment period, starting 2025, the utility is looking for help in its ERP software selection.

The company uses a mixture of business applications, including those from Oracle, but its financial accounting software platform comes from SAP.

The tender also details investment in data and analytics. In its current investment period, Southern Water is focused on data warehousing and lakes, data integration, data analytics and the development of business intelligence software. From 2025, it will seek help with projects including data manipulation, visualization, machine learning, deep learning, and model deployment.

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In 2021, Southern Water — which provides water services across southern England from Hampshire to Kent — named IBM, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro among 13 winners on a £50 million deal to help build and manage applications.

The company has a relationship with UK outsourcing firm Capita for front-office customer contact, back-office transaction processing, debt management, bill printing, mail and inbound correspondence handling under a deal set to end in 2025. ®