Scope
Reference
DN776416
Description
Southend-on-Sea City Council is looking to appoint a suitable Supplier to provide a case management system to support the functionality required by the legal team to manage their day-to-day workload and case management requirements. The system will need to be able to facilitate the transactions needed for all of the required services.
The legal teams in Southend-on-Sea City Council that will use the system cover the following areas within the Council Commercial and regulatory, adult and children's Social Care, Property, Planning, highways and land charges.
The provision of this system is to ensure efficiency and provide an effective process to enable electronic management of case work in the legal team and will ideally be cloud based.
The system will need to provide the legal teams an end-to-end case management system for all legal work. This will include functionality to time record and securely hold data and aid the service to become a predominantly paperless service.
The system will need to provide consistent and standardised best practice work processes, prefilled templates, documentation and automation and enable effective case management from receiving instructions to completing matters. The system will also need to have the ability to pull a wide range of reports for various tasks and processes.
Total value (estimated)
- £240,000 excluding VAT
- £288,000 including VAT
Above the relevant threshold
Contract dates (estimated)
- 8 December 2025 to 7 December 2028
- Possible extension to 7 December 2030
- 5 years
Description of possible extension:
Option to extend by 2 x 12 months
Main procurement category
Goods
CPV classifications
- 48170000 - Compliance software package
- 48311000 - Document management software package
- 48445000 - Customer Relation Management software package
- 48517000 - IT software package
Contract locations
- UKH31 - Southend-on-Sea
Participation
Particular suitability
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SME)
Submission
Enquiry deadline
20 August 2025, 12:00pm
Submission type
Requests to participate
Deadline for requests to participate
5 September 2025, 3:00pm
Submission address and any special instructions
The provisioning of documentation relating to the Procurement Process and the submission of Responses from interested Parties will be conducted electronically via Southend-on-Sea City Council's Electronic Tender Facility, ProContract:
https://procurement.southend.gov.uk/southend/portal.nsf/index.htm
The Candidates must ensure that they have downloaded and are fully aware of all the information which they are required to be in receipt of, to complete and return to successfully submit a Project Specific Questionnaire Response.
All submissions must be forms to be completed online via Pro Contract.
Tenders may be submitted electronically
Yes
Languages that may be used for submission
English
Suppliers to be invited to tender
3 to 5 suppliers
Selection criteria:
Any organisation who considers themselves a suitable Candidate to deliver the Customer's requirements as they relate to the Draft Tender Document's and who meets the minimum requirements of the Project Specific Questionnaire (PSQ) Stage Process will be invited to respond to the PSQ.Candidates who pass the PSQ Stage's listed mandatory requirements (Pass or Fail elements) will then have their responses to the Contract Specific Questions evaluated.Responses to the Contract Specific Questions will be evaluated to determine the respective scores for each Candidate. These scores which will be used to determine an overall ranking order of Candidates.The intention (based upon receiving sufficient suitable Candidates) is to invite the 4 highest scoring Candidates to Tender Stage 2. However, subject to the Number of Candidates and their respective scoring Southend-on-Sea City Council reserves the right to alter the number of Candidates invited to tender.The determining of the number of Candidates for Stage 2 will be in accordance with the Procurement Act 2023 and the Procurement Regulations 2024.
Award decision date (estimated)
28 November 2025
Award criteria
| Name | Type | Weighting |
|---|---|---|
| Technical (Quality) Evaluation | Quality | 60% |
| Commercial Evaluation | Price | 40% |
Other information
Conflicts assessment prepared/revised
Yes
Procedure
Procedure type
Competitive flexible procedure
Competitive flexible procedure description
This process will utilise a Multi-stage Competitive Flexible Procedure with the following stages:
• A discrete Conditions of Participation stage (including checking Exclusion Grounds).
• A stage for limiting the number of Suppliers to be invited to submit a Tender.
• A single Tendering Round (with the opportunity to request non-material changes to the contract).
The procedure being used is intended to replicate the Restricted Procedure from the previous legislation; specifically, Regulation 28 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, with some minor flexibility to "tweak"/ request not material changes to the contract before award.
The Council has designed this Procurement Process to utilise the option to limit the number of Participating Suppliers following a discrete Request to Participate stage. Following the discrete Conditions of Participation stage and the stage for limiting the number of Suppliers, the Council will invite up to 5 Suppliers to submit Tenders.
In the event that there are no Suppliers/or only one Supplier who is deemed suitable, the Contracting Authority reserves the rights to abandon this Procurement Process and make a Direct Award under Schedule 5(6) PA23 and publish the relevant notices
Southend-on-Sea City Council reserves the right to issue updated versions of the Associated Tender Documents to Suppliers as and when the need arises, in order to reflect the corresponding stage of the Competitive Flexible Procedure, together with any changes to the Procurement or any other new information. Suppliers will be notified by the Council via the Electronic Tender Facility's message system of the issuing of any amended Tender Documents
Selection criteria:
Any organisation who considers themselves a suitable Candidate to deliver the Council's requirements as they relate to the Draft Tender Document's and who meets the minimum requirements of the Project Specific Questionnaire (PSQ) Stage Process will be invited to respond to the PSQ.
Candidates who pass the PSQ Stage's listed mandatory requirements (Pass or Fail elements) will then have their responses to the Contract Specific Questions evaluated. Responses to the Contract Specific Questions will be evaluated to determine the respective scores for each Candidate. These scores which will be used to determine an overall ranking order of Candidates.
The intention (based upon receiving sufficient suitable Candidates) is to invite the 4 highest scoring Candidates to Tender Stage 2. However, subject to the Number of Candidates and their respective scoring. Southend-on-Sea City Council reserves the right to alter the number of Candidates invited to tender.
Examples of this include, but are not limited to:
- If there is a substantial scoring gap between Candidates 3 and 4
or
- There is negligible scoring difference between Candidates 4 and 5
In the event of either of these examples occurring 3 or 5 may be invited through to Stage 2 respectively.
Stage 2 of the process will invite the selected suppliers at stage 1 to submit a tender response.
This stage will consist of a 2 part assessment, Part A - Method Statements and Part B - Presentations
Part A (Quality) will be measured via responses (Method Statements) to the questions within the online Technical Questionnaire. Suppliers will be required to meet a minimum score if they do not meet the minimum score their tender will be eliminated from the Tender process and will not be assessed further.
At this stage Part B , suppliers will also be invited to provide a Quality Presentation / Demonstration also. This will be measured by a set criteria to ensure a fair and transparent process is in place to assess the presentations of each supplier. Following the assessment of the presentations the scores from part A Quality (the method statements) will be updated.
Stage 3 of the process will be a commercial evaluation of the supplier's price submission. This will not be assessed if the supplier's responses in stage 2 do not meet the minimum score requirements.
Formal preliminary market engagement was not conducted but informal engagement took place in the form of contacting other similar organisations to get feedback on the case systems they use. Some desktop research on the systems available also took place.
Contracting authority
Southend-on-Sea City Council
- Public Procurement Organisation Number: PJDT-6566-GZNX
Civic Centre, Victoria Avenue, Southend On Sea, Essex
Southend On Sea
ss2 6fa
United Kingdom
Region: UKH31 - Southend-on-Sea
Organisation type: Public authority - sub-central government