NW3134 - Governance, Risk & Compliance System

Northumbrian Water Limited (NWL) provide water and sewerage services to just under 4.4 million people operating principally in the North-East of England, Essex, and Suffolk. It is NWL's vision 'to be the most digital water company in the world'. Northumbrian Water Group (NWG) is a large and diverse organisation which employs a varied set of processes to achieve its business outcomes. To ensure that it meet its regulatory requirements (OFWAT, Defra, DWI, EA and UKAS requirements), statutory requirements (Health and Safety requirements; Environmental safety requirements), shareholder requirements and customer requirements it attempts to identify risks, incidents and associated mitigations to reduce the probability of interruption of its core business processes, therefore it is our mission to find a Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) solution that supports this.

NWL wish to procure a 3 year contract (with options to extend for 3+3+3+3 years) for a new Governance, Risk and Compliance tool. The tool will be used across all areas of the business and will support NWL employees who are either based at one of our numerous sites, work from home or who are field based in completing their daily tasks in line with regulatory, statutory, shareholder and customer requirements.

Our current GRC tool is used by over 6000 users to capture GRC data. The current solution allows NWL employees to collect information using forms (including images and map information) which can be created on a 'self-serve' basis on desktop and mobile (with offline data capture functionality). This information is manually reviewed by the admin team and assigned to the appropriate workflow in the system backend. Reports are then created and exported to create PowerBI dashboards and reports. The key features that we are looking for in a new solution are for it to support us with providing an easy, timely and high-quality employee user experience and help us to continue with our journey to drive automation and self-service in capturing governance, risk, and compliance data - key desirable features of the new solution are listed below:

NWL have an objective to procure a GRC solution by end of June 2026 with implementation to take place between July 2026 and December 2026 in anticipation for a planned go live date of January 2027. Within our requirements there are also items we would look to introduce at some future stage, subject to business needs.