The JEA decided to award the bid for its GPS implementation project for nearly $2 million Nov. 22, but that award has been stayed while its chief procurement officer considers a protest, which was heard Monday, made by one of the bidders about the utility’s bid process.
“There are base requirements that need to be met to be considered for this contract,” said Ted Davis, president of Utility Associates, which was the second-ranked company in the bid process. “We don’t think that SageQuest meets these requirements.”
Two of the main issues Davis pointed out were the functionality of the antennas to be mounted in JEA vehicles and equipment and employee tracking.
The Utility Associates design includes a roof-mounted antenna and SageQuest features an antenna mounted inside the cab of the vehicle under the dashboard.
Employees could be tracked with radio frequency identification badges with the Utility Associates system and SageQuest’s proposal includes a key fob that employees would touch to a reader mounted on the dashboard of the vehicle.
“The key fob is not an automatic system. A user has to register with the reader for the system to track employees,” said Davis. “The RFID cards help us track each employee in the vehicle.”
After hearing the protest from Utility Associates, JEA Chief Procurement Officer John McCarthy asked both SageQuest, whose representatives were present via teleconference, and Utility Associates to answer some questions.
“What I’m most interested in is the discussion around the multifunctional antenna,” said McCarthy.
SageQuest was given the opportunity to address the issues presented by Davis.
“We want to focus on the requirements from JEA,” said Todd Ewing, senior product manager with SageQuest. He referred to the Request for Proposal.
“We feel confident that we have met those requirements with the device we have described and put into our RFP. We feel like there are arguments to be made for any unit in the market, how they operate, how they could be tampered with or how they are, more or less, functional than other units in a number of different circumstances.”
“As a company, we feel very comfortable in the unit that we are putting out is a quality unit that will perform well for JEA as it does for thousands of customers every month that we deploy this same unit to,” said Ewing.
Davis argued that a multifunction antenna mounted on the roof would have better reception than a unit mounted under the dashboard of the vehicle because it has more material to interfere with the signal.
The two companies provided demonstrations of their systems Nov. 21 and the companies were scored:
• SageQuest — $1,841,514. Score: 80 points (price) and 19.1 (demo) for a total score of 99.1 points.
• Utility — $1,992,930. Score: 73.6 points (price) and 18.1 (demo) for a total score of 91.7 points.
Based on the scoring, JEA decided to award the contract to SageQuest, but that decision was stayed because of the protest filed by Utility Associates.
McCarthy plans on releasing his determination by the end of the week. If Utility Associates is not satisfied with that determination, it has the opportunity to file an appeal with the JEA Procurement Appeals Board.
JEA decided to pursue a GPS system that would enable it to track the movement of its employees, vehicles and equipment to increase transparency and efficiency throughout the operation of the public utility.
The project will allow the JEA to track factors that include location of vehicles, daily mileage, average and maximum speeds, ignition off-time, proximity of vehicles to other vehicles, length of time to complete tasks and an alert for when the system loses communication with the vehicle user.
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