Cost Intelligence Software

National Grid is seeking the provision of a groupwide Cost Intelligence digital solution. National Grid Group is planning to invest around £70 billion over the next five years to scale and strengthen its existing network, ensuring it can meet the needs of customers now and in the future.

To support this, National Grid is seeking to establish a new groupwide cost intelligence capability that enables better access to supplier, project and market cost data across the business. A digital solution is required as part of this capability.

The solution will focus on Supplier and Market Intelligence and is intended to provide estimating, procurement, commercial and finance users with access to comparable supplier cost data, project final account data and relevant market-based insight. The solution is expected to bring together supplier bid return data, project final account data and relevant market indices into a single digital tool environment.

It should enable users to search, query, analyse and compare cost data across relevant dimensions, including asset archetypes, Cost Breakdown Structure items, activities, regions, suppliers and unit rates, where the underlying data structure allows. National Grid requires a user-centred digital capability that provides self-service dashboards, search, analytics and reporting tailored to different user groups.

The solution may include AI-enabled analytics, natural language search or conversational query functionality to help users interrogate cost data, generate different types of benchmark insight and surface relevant intelligence more quickly. The solution will leverage a National Grid data lake or other approved data environment, with National Grid retaining ownership and control of its data.

The solution should connect to, ingest from or consume data from approved customer data sources, including data lakes, data warehouses, lakehouses, APIs, enterprise systems, structured files or equivalent sources. National Grid is seeking a flexible and scalable solution that can evolve over time as data quality, user adoption and business requirements mature.

The solution should support stronger cross-Business Unit comparability, more consistent supplier cost benchmarking, improved estimating confidence and more informed engagement with delivery partners and the wider supply chain. The solution may be delivered through an existing SaaS product, configurable platform, managed digital product, bespoke software build. National Grid is not seeking an advisory-only consultancy service.