TEC’s request

In Wallonia, TEC is responsible, on behalf of the Walloon Region, for organising and tendering for school transport services. This involves nearly 1,000 daily journeys for approximately 25,000 pupils, carried out using vehicles ranging from taxis and minibuses to larger buses. The pupils attend, for the most part but not exclusively, special needs schools. Some of the pupils to be transported are wheelchair-bound.

TEC has asked inno-V to contribute its expertise to the redesign of the outdated contracting process for school transport services, including the tendering method (award model). This involves around a thousand contracts that are put out to tender periodically. In addition, TEC wished to organise a market consultation with transport operators. inno-V was tasked with contributing to the rewriting of the standard contracts and providing support for the actual tendering process for the revised contract approach.

Our approach

For this mission, inno-V undertook the following activities:

• Internal consultations with the regional managers of school transport services within TEC to explore and discuss potential improvements, including reaching a consensus on the revised approach
• Organisation of a market consultation for interested transport operators and summarisation of the views gathered
• Formulation of options for the modernisation and streamlining of contracting and tendering
• Redesign of the school transport quality management system
• Design of a cost model to predict the expected costs of the services and to assess tenders against these
• Contribution to the drafting of the revised tender documents
• Design of a semi-automated tender analysis system
• Supporting TEC in the transition to the updated tender processing system and knowledge transfer

The result

From a system that previously faced significant challenges due to the pre-exiting payment system for transport operators and a lack of competition, the redesign of contracting and tendering has led to the emergence of a healthy level of competition with realistic prices. The workload associated with the tendering procedure for the school transport service managers within TEC has also been significantly reduced, which has helped to speed up the procedures.