Assisting the District in their efforts to secure an automation vendor’s support for the next 20 years

Orange County Sanitation District SP-196 SCADA Upgrade Study

The Orange County Sanitation District (OCSD) human machine interface (HMI) used to run their sanitation plant was past its useful life and maintaining the equipment had become challenging—the District could no longer find vendor support when issues arose.

Our team was engaged to assist in securing an automation vendor to support their equipment for the next 20 years. First, we developed a Master Service Agreement (MSA) allowing the District to create terms of service and cost of products over the contract lifecycle. We also assisted in RFP document creation, helped create a classroom trials syllabus, and assisted in the vendor selection panel by participating in the classroom trials and interviews. Our biggest challenge was guiding OCSD through the many different vendor solutions to help them understand what would fit best now and into the future. To assist with this decision, we used an online vendor RFP scoring app so that everyone on the scoring team worked independently and did not share scores until the appropriate time. This ensured complete transparency in the event of a protest following the announcement of awarded vendor.

The expertise we shared with OCSD to help secure a long-term vendor will allow their operations to run efficiently for years to come, with minimal downtime.