The sustainability test was completed in parallel with the procurement strategy and embedded into the final document.
The following criteria were deemed relevant and influenceable:
Will the product or service procured, routinely involve consumption of energy (electricity, gas or other fuel) and/or is there an opportunity to minimise energy consumption, including through innovative solutions?
Are there opportunities to generate employment and training opportunities (particularly for priority groups), develop trade skills in potential suppliers' existing workforce and drive equal opportunities recruitment procedures?
Are there opportunities to improve fair work practices to ensure the workforce is well motivated, well rewarded and well led?
The strategy was to include 6% weighting (as part of 70% quality weighting) for sustainability within the award criteria, split as follows:
Detail how you would provide reporting on each individual partners CO2 usage (2%)
Detail your roadmap towards net zero and beyond as an organisation. NB: please note this should be as a high level summary rather than copies of policy documents (2%).
How will your staff training and development ensure that service levels remain high through the duration of the contract (2%)
The specification also included the following requirements:
Requirement to locate data centres in the UK, for security reasons, where practicable - something that can be supported by hybrid cloud hosting providers
The supplier should provide annual CO2 emissions consumption data resulting from the use of buyer and partner organisations hybrid cloud services
Supplier must have the ability to analyse the historical cost including forecasted changes in usage, best practice, security, inventory and utilisation of hybrid cloud services on EIS and partners’ environments. All of these will be included in monthly optimisation reports to be reviewed by buyer and supplier
The supplier to ensure that buyer and partner organisation’s resources are sufficient enough to meet its business needs and are also cost-effective
The supplier must monitor and manage buyer and partner organisation’s IT infrastructures to ensure that it is effective and efficient at all times.
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