Renata Wojteczko
Director – Procurement and Category Management
Toronto Transit Commission
In the last ten years, sustainability has evolved from a buzz word to now, in the case of the TTC, forming part of our ambitious corporate plan. My team’s first foray into sustainability requirements in procurement, materialized through the procurement of our hybrid electric and electric buses and it all began with a very familiar question: “how do you evaluate sustainable requirements?” As with many procurement related questions, we found that there isn’t a “one size fits all solution” and that in some cases sustainability is a custom-made approach for every procurement.
Fleet procurement at the TTC represents a long-term investment towards providing a reliable service to our customers. In the case of vehicle procurements, the engineering team at the TTC incorporated equipment and vehicle features into the technical specifications in order to achieve the sustainability goals such as a hybrid electric or and electric propulsion system. Having clear technical specifications allowed the TTC to define quantifiable requirements to be evaluated as part of the procurement process. As we all know, it is important to define clear evaluation criteria and allow your procurement teams to provide feedback at the end of the process to those participants who were not successful.
In the case of the vehicle procurement there were two aspects to developing the criteria related to sustainability: corporate initiatives and policies as they relate to sustainability and technical features of the vehicle that support sustainability objectives. TTC believes that understanding an organization’s commitment to sustainability and ensuring that sustainable objectives form part of their corporate policies will help support a culture of innovation with a focus on the environment rather than simply developing a product that “checks all the sustainability boxes”. For the purposes of the Hybrid Bus and Electric Bus procurement, the TTC requested information regarding memberships to green or environmental sustainability organizations such as the World Business Council, Dow Jones Sustainability Index and B-Corporation in addition to details on whether green procurement policies were in place at the organization at the time of the procurement.
An aspect often overlooked when including new evaluation requirements such as sustainability, diversity and Canadian content, is the commercial mechanism included in the agreement that will ensure that once the contract is awarded, the proponents deliver on the features and plans that formed the basis of their selection at the procurement stage and other technical requirements associated with the vehicle. In order to ensure compliance throughout the contract, the procurement, legal and engineering teams developed enforceable clauses to allow the TTC to measure performance metrics and in some instances, apply liquidated damages if not met. For example, from a reliability stand point, the contractual requirements outline targets required to be maintained for the fleet’s mean distance between failures in addition to fleet availability targets and the formula by which these targets are calculated are clearly outlined in the technical specifications.
The success of this procurement was demonstrated by the TTC’s ability to enter into two agreements with two bus manufacturers for the delivery of both hybrid-electric and electric buses. For both technologies, we utilized a non-binding RFP approach which provided an opportunity to proponents during the procurement process to highlight potential concerns with both the commercial and technical requirements which was then considered by TTC and incorporated in the final requirement that formed the basis of the proposals. This collaborative approach allowed both proponents and the TTC to align on numerous objectives and ensure that this massive step in the TTC’s sustainability journey was accomplished. The TTC will continue to measure the performance of the vehicles and utilize these lessons learned for future procurements, this includes sharing our journey with other transit agencies and municipalities that have also set ambitious sustainability objectives.