Public procurement notice: Periodic Indicative Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2017-02-24
Buyer: The Manchester Airport Group PLC
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
CPV classification: 32231000 | 32235000 | 32510000 | 48000000 | 48100000
EU fund: ESF

Technical requirements: Manchester Airports Group (MAG) is the largest UK-owned airport operator, serving over 55 million passengers per annum through its ownership and operation of Manchester, London Stansted, East Midlands and Bournemouth Airports.
To keep pace with growing passenger numbers and increased customer expectations, MAG is undertaking significant investment to enhance its terminals, passenger experience, and digital capabilities.
MAG's strategy is to ‘deliver great customer service at every touch point’ and we want to invest for the long term in the latest technologies to enable this to happen. Our vision is to be able to assist our customers in their journeys from end-to-end across all of our airports. This requires us to identify when passengers come onto our airports, by all means of transport, linking this information to our Salesforce CRM system so that we can understand their needs and preferences on their journey.
We wish to facilitate the identification and communication with passengers within our airports' campuses. Our airports have internal data sources, such as automatic number plate recognition in car park barriers. We are also interested in other methods and sources of identification and tracking. All tracking and interaction must be in line with legal obligations such as data protection and privacy laws.
Once on the airport, we want to be able to guide our customers along their journey through enhanced digital wayfinding services and keeping them informed about the length of queues. This way we can give our customers a stress-free journey and time to enjoy the facilities of the airport, providing (with their permission) real-time push information and personalised offers to enhance their experience. MAG are currently investing in CCTV and a Wi-Fi access point and beacon network across our terminals and this should form the foundation upon which any further hardware and software can be built. Data sources on customers within the terminal include log-ins to the Wi-Fi network, CCTV feeds, boarding card scans, and data from our retail partners.
We also want to ensure our operations have detailed real-time information on passenger flows and queue times to allow us to efficiently manage key customer areas, specifically check-in, security, and passport control. Queue times need to be linked to specific queues (e.g. to the check-in desks of a particular airline, taking into account that check-in desks may be allocated and reallocated dynamically during the course of the day). Outside of queuing zones, operations need to understand passenger flows to ensure efficient layouts and use of space, and to inform cleaning and maintenance. This information therefore needs to be available in real-time dashboards that can inform operational management and also historically to enable facilities management, planning, and forecasting.
In addition to understanding customers' journeys from end-to-end, including dwell times, queue times, and spend profile, we wish to combine this with MAG customer data from our Salesforce CRM, thereby creating richer views and insights into our customer base.
As these requirements are part of MAG's broader customer and digital strategies, we require all data to be owned by MAG and compliant with UK legal requirements. All data should go into MAG's data warehouse for reporting, BI and analytics/visualisation using MAG tools, though additional specialist reporting/analytical tools may be required by some end users. Two way exchange of data with MAG's other existing (e.g. SAP ERP) or planned solutions (e.g. Total Airport Management systems), are essential requirements. Our requirement is for real time, high availability data with significant accuracy levels for key metrics, such as queue times.
MAG is therefore seeking expressions of interest from suitably experienced suppliers or groups of suppliers to participate in a soft market testing activity that will inform the Customer Insight Strategy and any potential procurement activity to be launched in future.
Those suppliers that are interested in participating in this opportunity should email ITProcurement@magairports.com, ensuring ‘MAG 1655 Customer Insight Strategy’ is referenced in the email subject. Suppliers should also provide the following information:
Expressions of interest should be provided no later than 17:00 Friday 17.3.2017. Expressions of interest received after this date may not be considered.
Please be advised that participation, to any extent, in this soft market testing activity does not serve as a prerequisite for participation in any future procurement activity with MAG. Should a formal procurement activity be initiated at a later date, MAG may issue a notice for publication in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) to publicise the contract opportunity.
Should a formal procurement exercise be launched, the use of Achilles Utilities Vendor Database (UVDB) may be sought by MAG. UVDB is a qualification system within the meaning of the Utilities Contracts Regulations 2006 (as amended).