Why are you late to Smart City RFPs?
Digital Intelligence Knew About Kansas City’s Plan A Year Ago
Kansas City’s Smart City Program has launched an RFP process and opened the floodgates to proposals on modernizing its infrastructure. This hasty process can be over as quickly as it begins. Is there a way for companies to get ahead of the RFP process and establish themselves with a city sooner?
Kansas City is in the middle of a massive infrastructure reorganization. The city prides itself in being the “World’s Most Connected Smart City” and has ambitious expansion plans. Smart Cities are complicated to pin down. At its core, a smart city takes the challenges of urbanization and builds a framework of information and communication technologies to address them. The Kansas City initiative includes a free streetcar, 50 blocks of free public Wi-Fi and smart streetlights along with a swell of water and wastewater projects. The goal is to improve the delivery of city services with data at the center.
Among the water design projects over the next three years are an advanced metering infrastructure, a water treatment plant capacity upgrade, switchgear and water main replacements, tank painting, and meter field services and replacement. Wastewater projects include a GIS data attribute cleanup, SCADA improvements, screen replacements, collection system improvements, primary clarifier mechanisms replacement, an aerobic digester addition and sludge pump replacement.
The city recently issued an RFP for the “Comprehensive Smart City Partnership with Kansas City, Missouri”, on an ambitious timeline. These competitive, short RFP windows can signal that it’s time to get involved, but as we all know, it can mean a vendor is already ahead of the pack, if not already chosen. However there are ways to put yourself in that pole position and get connected to such opportunities earlier. The ability to forecast RFP’s has the potential to give companies and sales teams an extreme advantage.
How can we forecast request for proposals to create this advantage in the RFP process?
Using WatrHub, Kansas City would have been identified as a water infrastructure target much earlier. Indicators presented themselves as early as February of 2016, when the city first shared the 2017 Capital Improvement Plan which provided information on 132 upcoming drinking water and wastewater system projects. WatrHub pinpointed Kansas City as a target through in March 2017, when the city laid out detailed design goals in 2018 and construction objectives for 2020. A company working with WatrHub could have built a relationship prior to the design goals (2018), the construction objectives (2020) and well before the RFP process was initiated.
WatrHub has the power to take a mountain of information and pull out early indicators relevant to specific company priorities, allowing water technology companies to zero in on municipal or utility issues before an RFP is issued, complete with contact information to help turn that target into a sale.
With this tool, companies can get in tune with targets earlier, giving themselves the chance to establish themselves as a solution for the target as soon as an issue arises. For a technology company looking to get ahead of the crowd, WatrHub is teeming with invaluable opportunities.
