Microscopes

Tender description

Award of contract to Carl Zeiss Ltd. Award of contract to Carl Zeiss Ltd for cover of the following diverse range of specialist equipment: — Zeiss Crossbeam 550 Focused Ion Beam FEG Scanning Electron Microscope, — Zeiss Versa 520 X-Ray Microscope, — Zeiss Evo LS25 LaB6 Scanning Electron Microscope, — Zeiss ObserverZ1M Inverted stage, fully motorised optical microscope, — Zeiss Imager 2 Motorised Optical Microscope for Materials Research, — Zeiss Smartzoom 5 Digital Microscope system, — Zeiss Stemi 508 and Primotech MAT and POL microscope models. 1.2) The cover involves service and development assistance, particularly with correlative work between the different techniques involved. This includes responsibility for full servicing and supply of OEM parts, revisions of software controllers and assistance in the development of integrated features and hardware to enable the correlative workflow to be fully utilised; 1.3) The total value of the contract is 198 495,36 GBP ex VAT for a 48-month period. Justification for the direct award/technical exemption: Critically as the OEM for our existing technical equipment, they are the only company who can guarantee cover for the comprehensive service and repair of all of the systems. Without the specialist (and commercially proprietary) knowledge of the system provided by the OEM (that can only be gleaned through original manufacture of the equipment) there is significant risk of equipment failing beyond repair and subsequent non-delivery of critical publicly funded multi-million pound research programs.