Operations Production Support

The Authority is seeking to establish a call-off framework agreement with one supplier to provide support to produce and maintain its existing and future product offerings.

Interested parties are advised that this opportunity includes four (4) mandatory sample tasks, which must be completed as they form a large part of the evaluation and award process.

These will help evaluate the capability of the interested party to perform the work, but will also be priced tasks under the contract on award.

Other work, as yet undefined, that the Authority may require relating to the production and maintenance of its' products and services may be trialled and pricing agreed during the course of the contract.

Interested parties are advised that, due to the confidential nature of some information that will need to be disclosed by the UKHO during this award procedure and, later, to the successful tenderer, all economic operators invited to participate in the award procedure will be required to enter into confidentiality agreements with the Secretary of State prior to such disclosure.

For the same reason, direct competitors of the UKHO and any economic operators affiliated to such direct competitors will be excluded from this award procedure.

The UKHO reserves the right to determine, in its sole discretion, whether an economic operator falls into this excluded category of economic operators.

Data which may need processing includes, but is not limited to: source material from foreign government charts, notices to mariners, bathymetric surveys, mapping, imagery, textual documents, magnetic and tidal models, geodetic and tidal data and it may include ingest or processing into the Authority's Source Data Receipt and Assessment (SDRA) and Hydrographic Database (HDB) systems.

Possible requirements include, but are not limited to the following: maintenance of data and metadata in existing forms and formats; improvement, harmonisation and/or migration of data and metadata to different or future formats or platforms (such as metrication and change of projections); the storage, upkeep and extraction of data in ways that allow the best use of data in value added services to users/consumers of data.

Currently the Authority's principal data storage and processing sy