Infrastructure Advisory

Greater Wellington Regional Council is responsible for the provision of public transport services in the Greater Wellington region.

As Programme Director of the Bus Services Transformation Programme, Andrew was responsible for delivery of a number of projects providing a step change in the service performance, cost effectiveness and ease of use for customers of bus services in the region.

These projects included:

• Implementation of the Public Transport Operating Model (PTOM) for bus and the associated procurement of 16 bus operating contracts across the region to the value of circa $80 million pa. The objective of PTOM is to deliver a competitive public transport operator market, with enhanced service levels and value for money for the public purse by tendering new performance based contracts. The successful implementation of PTOM is critical to the delivery of a range of interdependent transformational initiatives that will change the way PT services are delivered in Wellington in the future.
• Fleet transition – incorporating the transition from trolley buses and old diesel fleets to a low emission bus fleet and ultimately an all electric bus fleet in the region.
• New bus network – incorporating implementation of the new Wellington city bus network and the associated communication and transition arrangements with customers, bus operators and other stakeholders.

Andrew designed and led the procurement process for sixteen 9 and 12 year bus operating contracts. Under PTOM, services are grouped into ‘units’ of routes, each an exclusive contract with an operator. The Wellington region comprises 16 bus units. Seven of these units were directly appointed by negotiation to incumbent operators, with nine units tendered. The tender process included many features to reduce barriers to entry and is regarded as a benchmark for industry engagement. The result was a highly competitive tender process with nine local and international bus operators submitting tenders.

To meet Council aspirations for a low emission bus fleet, the tender process featured an industry-first quantitative assessment of bus fleet emissions using an economic cost to society approach to monetise bus emissions. This feature contributed to a tender outcome that has delivered 100% new buses to the tendered contracts, 95% of which are Euro VI, plus an initial ten battery electric buses which will be followed by the phased introduction of a further 22 electric buses over the first three years of the contracts. The resulting environmental outcomes are delivering improved air quality across the region with emissions of harmful pollutants reduced by 38 per cent in Wellington city and 84 per cent in the Hutt Valley conurbation. Read more here.

Andrew’s responsibilities also included the implementation of a redesigned bus network in Wellington city featuring a more integrated and connected system of bus routes designed to provide greater coverage and reach, while reducing route duplication and bus congestion in the central city. The new network features greater use of connecting services requiring the construction of 7 bus hubs at key locations across the city.

Stakeholder engagement has been a key area of focus throughout the project, requiring close working relationships with the NZ Transport Agency and Ministry of Transport. In addition to meeting governance requirements through the course of the project, Andrew regularly briefed the GW Council, together with other stakeholder TLAs, in particular Wellington City Council.

While the tender process met objectives for enhancing competition, delivering value for money and substantially improving bus fleet quality, the transition was particularly challenging. The new contracts, featuring two new entrants, new fleet and new depots were implemented at the same time as a radically new bus network, expanded and upgraded ticketing system, upgraded real time information system and a substantial change programme for the Regional Council, involving new roles, systems and processes.

Andrew led the establishment of a Performance Management function for the Highway and Network Operations (HNO) Group for the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA). This new team is responsible for the monitoring, measurement and bench marking of the Agency’s maintenance, operations and renewals activities.

A key outcome of the role has been to develop the Agency’s commercial intelligence and measurement and monitoring capability with respect to the cost of maintenance and renewals to assist the Agency become a more informed purchaser, and to ensure national planning is effective and investment is directed at the right places and at the right times.

Andrew provided direction to the setting of the Performance Framework for the Network Outcomes Contracts and the development of the measurement and bench marking tool for capturing this information.

Within this role Andrew also led a supply chain review of the maintenance market to inform the understanding of the drivers of market behavior.

As Commercial Lead on the Auckland EMU procurement project, Andrew brings the experience and learnings from one of the largest and most complex transport procurement projects in New Zealand in recent years, the procurement of Auckland’s first electric train fleet and long term maintenance arrangements.

Andrew was involved in all areas of procurement team responsibilities including:

• Input to procurement documents and procurement strategy
• Development of the evaluation strategy and evaluation criteria
• Review and input to supply and maintenance contracts
• Oversight of financial modelling for the supply, maintenance and depot scenarios
• Member of 4 person TET
• Formulation of an availability and performance regime under the long term maintenance contract
• Developing the negotiation strategies and leading the commercial aspects of the negotiations with the two shortlisted bidders

As the lead commercial advisor Andrew was responsible for managing a team of senior financial and commercial advisors from tier 1 and tier 2 Australian and NZ firms.

In leading the commercial work stream, he oversaw the financial modelling for the project. These financial models were used, inter alia, to model the whole of life costs of the rolling stock and maintenance services and to determine the Price Estimate, required for the NZTA prescribed Price Quality (PQ) evaluation methodology.

Andrew was the economic lead to the project, as well as being the project’s freight and maritime advisor.

In 2013, the MOT undertook a detailed investigation of the proposal to relocate the South Island ferry terminal to Clifford Bay. The purpose of this process was to examine the commercial viability of Clifford Bay as a development requiring minimum investment and risk for the government. As part of the detailed investigation a comprehensive economic assessment was also undertaken, led by Andrew.

The economic case assessed both the conventional national cost benefit analysis (CBA) of the project as well as wider economic benefits (WEBs).

Andrew was instrumental in gaining buy-in across the three stakeholder agencies – MOT, NZTA and Treasury, to the approach taken and final deliverables.

Andrew was a co-author of the National Freight Demand Study 2013 (an update to the initial NFDS undertaken in 2008). The NFDS provides a comprehensive assessment of the NZ freight sector and provides forecasts of future activity at both a nationwide and regional level. To examine the freight task in detail, the detailed production and movement of 29 commodities were investigated. For each of these commodities, information was built up from a wide range of published and unpublished sources and this was supported by discussions with a large number of participants in the freight sector. The steps involved for each commodity included:

• Identify the total size of the market and where possible the regional distribution of activities
• Determine the linkages between the areas where the goods are produced or imported and where they are consumed or exported.

In developing future freight forecasts, information was drawn from a wide range of sources including the views of industry stakeholders, forecasts from the Ministries, trade associations, key producers and other authoritative sources, and analysis of the recent and longer term trends in freight growth by commodity. These forecasts were supported by forecasts of key economic drivers such as population and GDP growth, particular factors affecting growth at a regional level, and an assessment of the potential impacts of supply constraints. Commodities were defined as primarily demand driven or supply constrained and appropriate indices based on both national macroeconomic and regional factors affecting demand and supply were developed.

Andrew led a team engaged to undertake an economic assessment, on a portfolio approach, for the RoNS program. This included a:

•  Review of existing conventional economic assessments;
•  Critique and integration of wider economic benefits (broader productivity and economic growth benefits) at a macro and regional level;
•  Sensitivity testing of the costs and benefits of the portfolio to understand the effect of accelerating the delivery program;
•  Quantification of the benefits of the RoNS on a portfolio basis and benefits from accelerating the implementation of the RoNS.

A number of international case studies were researched to provide best practice reference points for assessing the approach to the use of WEBs and the at a portfolio level.