OMC Announcement

Smart.met is looking for beyond state-of-the-art smart metering solutions
Have you developed innovative and ground-breaking solutions for the water sector or are you commercialising them?
Are you informed about high performing innovative solutions for smart metering?

Join the Smart.met Open Market Consultations!

What is SMART.MET?

Smart.met is a project funded by the European Commission whose the general objective is to address the development a new remote reading system for water meters, which ensures effectiveness, efficiency and interoperability and which is based on open standards.

Along the project duration a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) will be launched, concerning R&D service contracts that will be awarded to a number of R&D providers in parallel and in a phased approach. This will make it possible to compare competing alternative prototypes and a set of first products.

Each company selected to participate in the PCP will be awarded a framework agreement that covers three R&D phases: solution design, prototyping, original development and validation and testing of a limited set of first products or services. After each phase, intermediate evaluations will be carried out to progressively select the best of the competing solutions. The companies with the best value-for-money solutions will be offered a specific contract for the next phase.

This testing may also serve as a first customer test reference for companies (contractors).

The procurement is expected to start at the beginning of 2018 and end in 2020.

The selected companies will retain ownership of the intellectual property rights (IPRs) that they generate during the PCP and will be able to use them to exploit the full market potential of the developed solutions.

The Smart.met Buyers Group

The Lead Procurer will be Viveracqua, the public water utility supplying the Veneto Region in Italy. The other buyers are:

Promedio: public utility supplying the province of Badajoz (Spain)
Eau de Paris: public utility supplying the city of Paris (France)
SDEA: public utility supplying the region of Alsace-Moselle (France)
CILE: public utility supplying the city of Liège and its surroundings (Belgium)
Budapest Waterworks: public utility supplying the city of Budapest (Hungary)
Hydrobru: the public utility distributing water to the Brussels region (Belgium)

What are we looking for?

Public companies in charge of the management of drinking water supply are facing key challenges, some of them related to external factors (such as water scarcity due changing climate conditions) and others related to technical and economic aspects of drinking water provision (such as infrastructure ageing). Some of those challenges are directly connected to traditional water meters, including water losses ("non-revenue water") or the need for more efficient meter reading and billing systems.

In this context, smart water metering will be one of the key elements leading to more efficient water management in this new century. By allowing for automatic reading and billing, real-time assessment of the water balance or direct detection of meter defaults, smart meters can help decrease operating costs, identify performance issues, improve customer service and better prioritize infrastructure investments.

However, the lack of common European standards and the lack of "open technology platforms" combined with high demand-side transaction costs create a blocking situation on the market and lead to a long-term dependency of water utilities on technology suppliers. This situation results in high average operating costs and in collective inefficiencies linked to the multiplication of different proprietary solutions.

One of the major aims of this project is therefore to guide the development of new technologies for the management of intelligent metering collection and management. We are seeking an effective, efficient and interoperable system that is based on open standards.

To foster the development of innovative solutions it is necessary for the utilities to understand what the market is currently offering. This is the aim of the Open Market Consultations that are being organised during the month of September 2017: investigating the market and look for best solutions available today, so as to elaborate tender requirements that take into account the performance of the latest innovative solutions that are already on the market.

What are the aims of the Open Market Consultations?

Specifically, the SMART.MET Open Market Consultations aim at:

Finding out whether technologies are commercially available and acquire information about the advantages and disadvantages and the level of coverage of the desired functionalities, in order to confirm the assumption for the need of a PCP.
Enabling and increasing the opportunities for industry to form fit-for-purpose consortia.
Identifying market risks that could endanger business goals and supplier performance;

How to participate?

The Open Market Consultations are open to all companies (regardless of their geographic location, size and governance structure) aiming to acquire information about the state of the art of the technology in the field of smart water meters and access potential new markets.

Four Open Market Consultations will be organized:

Spain, Madrid – 5 September 2017 (Centro de Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Públicas (CEDEX) - C/Alfonso XII, 3/5 - Madrid Spain)
Italy, Livorno – 11 September 2017 (Villa Letizia - Via dei Pensieri, 60 - Livorno Italy)
Belgium, Brussels – 21 September 2017 (Vivaqua- Boulevard de l'Impératrice 17/19 - Bruxelles Belgium)
Hungary, Budapest – 27 September 2017 (Budapest Waterworks - Váci út 23/27 – H 1134 Budapest Hungary)

A written contribution (based on a questionnaire aimed to collect market information on innovative and commercialized solution) can be provided by the participants to help us develop a more in-depth state-of-the-art analysis and to assure the confidentiality on the information and solutions presented.

Register to the Open Market Consultation

In addition, an Open Market Innovation Survey has been put online. This survey is intended to explore the supplier market "as-it-is", there are, therefore, no "wrong" or "right" answers. The answers provided to this survey will be used as input for our procurement strategy, helping us to align it with the market offer.

Fill in the Smart.met Market Survey

In need of more technical details?

Download the Smart.met Technical Prospectous (v1)

Disclaimer - Please read this carefully!

This Open Market Consultation Survey IS NOT a call for tenders, NOR a pre-qualification exercise, NOR the request of Expression of Interest.
Participants to this market consultation will not necessarily be included, nor excluded, from a future public procurement procedure.
Participants are not expected to submit tenders or proposals at this stage.
The information in this document will be collected solely for technology assessment purposes and the provided answers in this market consultation will not be used to evaluate future commercial proposals.
After the public procurers group has processed the responses of all participants to the open market consultation, the project will communicate the results widely. The project policy is that all information provided will be treated as commercially sensitive and no supplier-specific details will be communicated. Only the general findings will be incorporated in a market consultation report which will be published to ensure compliance with transparency obligations.
The Open Market Innovation Survey and Consultations do not represent any obligation for project partners to enter a contractual agreement with any interested party.
The competitive phase of the Smart.met joined public procurement procedure will be conducted separately with an open and advertised procurement procedure.