Research and development services and related consultancy services

Tender description

Highways England’s Operations business is preparing to move into its second 5-year Road Investment Period between 2020 and 2025. To meet the challenges that our business faces, we are seeking a Strategic delivery partner (SDP) to advise and support our operational excellence transformational change programme, which is delivering long-term capability improvements and business efficiencies (see full details in description of procurement section). Highways England’s Operations business is preparing to move into its second 5-year road investment period between 2020 and 2025. To meet the challenges that our business faces, we are seeking a Strategic delivery partner (SDP) to advise and support our operational excellence transformational change programme, which is delivering long-term capability improvements and business efficiencies. This will be an arrangement that could last up to 5 years. We expect this programme to improve our planning functions; enhance the way we manage and control our network; make our approach to contracting more intelligent; improve maintenance productivity and develop our maintenance delivery processes to be more intelligence-led. We also want to become a more agile organisation; one that can be adaptable to our changing delivery priorities. To enable each of these aspirations to be realised, we need to make sure we have reliable, available and accessible data. We want to build a sustainable legacy of change and capability improvement in operations. It will enable us to deliver more effectively against our three imperatives of safety, customer and delivery, and our OE to 2025 objectives. We have been making progress towards these objectives during the first phase of operational excellence, which has been supported by our current SDP. Whilst working collaboratively with teams in operations and beyond, we want the successful delivery partner to challenge us both in the scope of our ambition and the timeframe in which it can be achieved. We will invite tenderers to set out how they think these outcomes can best be achieved, what methods and resources they propose to use to deliver them, and the timing and value of the work they would undertake.