The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) has used the Accelerated Capability Environment (ACE) as part of its bidding process to award the contract for a new generation of search and rescue.
The MCA, through HM Coastguard, provides a 24-hour search and rescue (SAR) emergency response service throughout the UK. This includes supporting other emergency services with search and rescue helicopters and planes from 10 bases around the UK.
The UK Second-Generation Search and Rescue Aviation programme (UKSAR2G) will replace the current contract, due to finish in 2024. It is designed to give a more modern, flexible, responsive and cost-effective way of providing the right search and rescue capabilities in the right places, improving response times, agility and efficiency - and ultimately saving more lives.
The MCA saw UKSAR2G procurement as an opportunity to make sense of all the data it gathers to help assess optimum future asset and infrastructure placing, as well as help manage the bid and governance process. It worked with ACE to help collect insights from its data and then build on that to create a tool which could:
- be shareable with aviation partners so they could use it to develop bid proposals
- help the MCA evaluate bids
What was created was something truly novel - it enabled industry access to real-world scenarios based on MCA data. This helped interested bidders design a more efficient and effective service which, in turn, enabled potential solutions to be created and tested.
Better use of data, providing better value for money
ACE did this by creating a service data model tool, using the MCA's mission data to create 6 different worlds of synthetic data that suppliers could freely play with and model against.
Designed to be "relatively freeform", potential suppliers could model where bases should be, and what assets should be at each, based on demand forecasts rather than being constrained by the present set-up. Crucially, a 'pass' of what the MCA needed was built into the system, so suppliers could see instantly if their bid met the minimum requirements, de-risking the procurement process for both sides. The MCA also used the tool to build its cost model, and to prove its case through the governance process of multiple assurance and approval cycles.
Neil Grant, programme director for the MCA, said:
We knew that we had amassed a wealth of data from the existing service over the past 9 years, and we wanted to utilise this so we could understand future demand for our services plus analyse emerging patterns and themes. This showed there were potential different ways of delivering the service in the future.
The work undertaken by ACE helped us in our policy and business case development and demonstrated the need for change. This work was led by John Foster from the MCA, who worked alongside ACE in the development of the model to deliver a truly great product which helped us secure investment in the UKSAR2G future service.
More than 30 aviation companies signed up to use the model, which provided a green tick or a red cross against scenarios showing whether bidders would be successful or not.
Steve Pickering, the MCA's aviation programme manager, said: "Before we even started evaluating, bidders knew whether their solution would pass the criteria required and that helped them as well as us."
The success of this data-sharing and interpretation model is now shaping how the MCA uses data modelling to plan as well as understand developing trends more widely across its services.
