Highways England is the government company charged with operating, maintaining and improving motorways and major (trunk) roads in England.

Civils asset management in Highways England includes drainage and geotechnical information, as well as pavements, structures and technology. Asset data enables Highways England to make informed decisions about the way it operates and maintains the strategic road network. Highways England continuously improves by gaining a better understanding of its assets through an asset delivery programme and investment in its asset management processes and systems. Highways England’s existing geotechnical and drainage asset information management systems (GDMS and Highways Agency Drainage Data Management System (HADDMS) respectively), are Highways England’s prime geotechnical and drainage asset information management systems for inventory and condition data. Management and upgrades to both asset information systems form part of a programme that has been ongoing for approximately twenty years.

The geotechnical asset information system, GDMS, was re-platformed (working with Mott MacDonald and Bentley Systems (formerly Keynetix)) between 2017 and 2020 (“Phase 12”) to mitigate against the risks of software obsolescence and to meet current business needs. As part of the re-platforming, a key business goal was to provide a systems architecture that could facilitate a single, unified platform that catered for management of both geotechnical and drainage assets. Highways England has been granted a license to use and adapt the specially written software and associated documentation. In order to maximise Highways England’s investment to date, Highways England wishes to compete the ongoing support and iteration of this project as part of this procurement exercise.

This project, the GDMS Phase 13 project, shall provide:

a) IT service management for the geotechnical aspects of the GDMS platform that have been developed to date;

b) A replacement for the legacy HADDMS platform; and

c) Interoperability services with Highways England’s other systems.

The overall objectives for the GDMS Phase 13 project are:

a) To put in place all necessary IT service management, software licensing, hosting, and sub-contracting arrangements (the “Transition Services”) in order to operate and maintain the current GDMS platform, within 3 months of the contract commencement date;

b) To deploy a HADDMS Replacement (which meets government technology standards) into live operation within 2 years of the Transition Services going live (in order for Highways England to switch off and decommission the legacy HADDMS platform) and to deploy interoperability with other Highways England systems within 6 months of the HADDMS Replacement going live (the “Drainage and General Implementation Services”);

c) To have a managed service for the support, maintenance, and continuous improvement of the GDMS platform during its business as usual operation. The contract duration will be five years with the option for two two-year extensions (i.e. 5 + 2 + 2), subject to business need and supplier performance;

d) To implement a HADDMS Replacement solution that leverages investment in the GDMS platform to date and enables future flexibility across a convergent platform for managing geotechnical and drainage assets, including through the implementation of optional services or future requirements without the need for major capital investment beyond this project, including (but not limited to):

• The GDMS platform must have a product roadmap which includes functionality readily available in the proposed product suite beyond the functionality currently stated in the Agreement that Highways England may wish to implement via the Variation Procedure (e.g. decision support tool functionality for network deterioration and what-if scenario modelling);

• The GDMS platform must enable Highways England to exchange data across different information systems and services in near real-time, for example, by means of an open Application Programme Interface (API), enabling unfettered access to all geotechnical and drainage related asset data wherever it is stored;

• The GDMS platform may be required to support the management of information for other Highways England asset classes, such as pavements, structures, technology, and street furniture;

• The GDMS platform must enable referencing of all geotechnical and drainage construction, survey and other related data to strategic road network models; and

• The successful Tenderer must propose new ideas, innovations, and service improvements via an annual Continuous Improvement Plan. Highways England may wish to implement such service improvements via the Variation Procedure.