Keolis, one of Europe’s leading public transport operators, in a joint venture partnership with Amey (70:30) used Huddle to manage its successful bid to operate the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) automated metro network. Tasked with bringing together internal staff and colleagues at Amey to work on the documentation for both the pre-qualification stage and bid itself, Keolis selected Huddle as it enabled secure cross-firewall collaboration.
The new joint venture – entitled Keolis Amey Docklands – will have responsibility for all train and passenger services across the network, including the maintenance of more than 34km of infrastructure, 38 stations, as well as rolling stock. The franchise will commence on 7 December 2014 and will run until 2021.
To respond to the Invitation to Tender (ITT), Keolis had to enable internal Keolis staff and teams from across Amey to securely access, share and work on required files. The organisation had to capture all the required work streams, draft documents, research and create a final submission. With around 40 people working on the bid at its peak, full audit trails, version control and approvals were vital.
Jim Lawless, Bid Director for Keolis Amey Docklands says: “Huddle proved to be an efficient and effective tool for ensuring that we had a shared knowledge of each element of our bid. It provided the perfect platform for the team to work across the many plans required for the ITT and allowed us to secure a consistent vision and approach, which ultimately delivered a winning bid.”
“With our cloud collaboration process used from the pre-qualification process through to the successful completion of the bid, we helped to make a very complex process far more straightforward,” explains Alastair Mitchell, CEO, Huddle. “In today’s workplace, people don’t just need to work with the colleagues that sit next to them or in other departments across their organisation, but many teams based at other companies. Bid management is a prime example and one of Huddle’s best use cases as it involves consultants, internal employees and specialists all coming together to work on a huge amount of valuable documentation. We’re proud to have been the technology supporting the successful DLR bid.”