Wales Telemetry System

Tender description

Natural Resources Wales (NRW) are looking to replace the existing Wales Telemetry System (WTS) service with a more efficient, user friendly solution that will meet NRWs future demands, to include improved use and handling of alarms and mobile access to the solution, seeking to harmonise and simplify operational working practices. NRW are using the Competitive Procedure with Negotiation for this procurement which includes PQQ and ITT stages. Successful bidders from the PQQ stage will be invited to tender for the full ITT. Draft tender documentation has been included for information at this stage. Lot 1: Natural Resources Wales is a Category 1 responder under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. Telemetry is a critical service supporting incident response and asset management by providing real-time information about the water environment and our assets. It provides key data for our flood forecasting and warning services, water resource management and for our understanding of the state of the environment. NRW's current system was implemented in the early 2000’s and no longer meets the operational or strategic requirements of NRW. NRW are seeking a modern system that will meet both their present needs and those anticipated in the next ten years. NRW needs to balance the risk to this critical service with a move to more modern technologies. The telemetry system is business critical, and the system architecture has been designed to ensure it is highly available, resilient and reliable. It is deployed in a duty / standby arrangement in geographically separate locations. The user base is distributed across Wales with access required from all offices and depots. It is a key requirement that users can also access the system when working remotely, from home or on site, with mobile access increasingly important. The existing NRW system was designed to meet the needs of Wales at that time and is based on communications technologies such as PSTN and GSM 2G analogue telephony which are due to be discontinued from 2025. The system and communications platforms must be refreshed to continue providing telemetry services which underpin: - NRW flood forecasting and warning services, including direct alerts to some communities. - Statutory roles such as river regulation. - Public information such as River Levels, Rainfall and Sea data online. - Water Company operational activities, including reservoir discharge control. - Bathing water quality prediction and public information - NRW operational activities involving access to rivers. - Statutory and category 1 responder activities for our professional partners.