Top ICT tenders: Transnet targets tech for fuel management

With political attention caught up in last week’s passing of the 2025 National Budget, the health of the Government of National Unity, threats of legal action and a potential Cabinet reshuffle, it is unsurprising that this week’s top tenders are dominated by state-owned entities.

The State Information Technology Agency (SITA) provides the most advertisements in this issue, but an invitation from Transnet takes top spot due to its ability to plug criminal activity at its port terminal operations.

Transnet says it requires the custom design, supply, installation, configuration, testing and commissioning of a fuel management system (FMS). This system will be rolled out at Transnet Port Terminals (TPT) in Richard’s Bay, Durban, Eastern Cape and Western Cape.

In the tender documentation, the organisation explains the FMS will assist TPT with fuel theft prevention by constantly monitoring fuel stock levels to automatically identify, investigate and report discrepancies. The FMS will also prevent unauthorised fuel dispensing into unauthorised equipment and assist the TPT in identifying fuel wastage within its consumption, thereby reducing fuel costs, it says.

Fuel theft has been an ongoing concern for Transnet. Just last month, the Free State High Court granted the Free State Asset Forfeiture Unit a preservation order for four trucks and six tankers linked to a large-scale Transnet fuel theft operation.

In February, four suspects − aged between 25 and 70 − were arrested by the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, commonly referred to as the Hawks, for allegedly tapping into a Transnet fuel pipeline that runs through Thina Sonke RDP housing project east of Alberton.

The scope of work for the FMS includes supply and installation of automation hardware such as fuel measuring instruments, biometric access control devices and telematics; data network connectivity and communication setup; and the design and deployment of a centralised cloud-based fuel management dashboard that will be owned by TPT.

Other tenders that make this week’s top 10:

• SITA wishes to acquire additional Commvault perpetual licences, as well as maintenance and support, for the Government Private Cloud Ecosystem’s enterprise backup and data management and disaster recovery (EBDMS) solution. The additional licences are required to cater for current and future growth within the EBDMS, to ensure continued backup and recovery. An additional 720TB front-end licence is required to address the overallocation and cater for growth.
• Proposals are also invited for the provision, installation, configuration, maintenance and support of an internet bandwidth solution to SITA, its next-generation network government clients and the South African Police Service. The agency notes the growth in demand for internet-based and bandwidth-intensive services has increased dramatically over the past few years and the client base requires more, faster and cheaper connectivity.
• Finally, SITA is looking for a single service provider for the supply, delivery and installation of category B routers for SA Connect on an on-demand procurement basis. SITA says it is currently implementing the SDN/SD-WAN solution on its core network, and as part of the network refresh, it is replacing customer premises equipment at end-of-life and end-of-support at all government facilities connected to SITA.
• Sentech wishes to appoint a panel of cloud platform providers and cloud hyperscalers. The state-owned entity says this forms part of its strategic expansion into cloud computing, and the selection for framework agreements and strategic partnerships will be based on various factors, including mutual interests, evaluation scores, market conditions, strategic positioning and business feasibility. The company notes it reserves the right to engage with selected partners from the panel through a closed bidding process and/or negotiations, ensuring alignment with its strategic objectives.

• The City of Cape Town is advertising for the provision of what it calls commodity IT-related hardware devices, including laptops and desktops; monitors; Android field devices; and repairs to existing equipment. These will be loaded onto SAP for any authorised city employee to purchase any quantity of such items as they have budget available on an ad hoc basis.

• Postbank is inviting bids for the procurement and implementation of an end-to-end monitoring tool on all of its payment systems and channels with maintenance and technical support. Once implemented, configured and enabled for production services monitoring, Postbank believes the tool will enable proactive responses to outages and failures on the systems with accurate speed and effective insight into its information stack. The maintenance and technical services will ensure the bank matures its monitoring services capabilities, it says.

• South African National Parks (SANParks) seeks a service provider for the provision of business intelligence development, support and maintenance. As part of its drive to modernise its technology assets, SANParks has entered into an enterprise agreement with Microsoft for activation and licensing of all Microsoft products utilised in its environment. The SANParks BI environment currently consists of three major applications.

• SANParks is also advertising for the development, support and maintenance of a customer relationship management system. The organisation says it recently successfully deployed the Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM suite to consolidate and centralise its customer data management in a single location. This has enabled improved customer service and experience, as well as enriched customer data for analytics, business intelligence, personalisation and marketing automation.

• The Border Management Authority closes the issue with an invitation to service providers to express their interest in being appointed to a panel for the supply and installation of a comprehensive network connectivity solution comprising of telephony, wireless LAN, WAN, and SD-WAN services in 71 ports of entry. These services will be implemented through a phased approach, with the first phase focusing on 13 ports of entry. During each phase of the project implementation, preference will be given to service providers with the most extensive network coverage in the relevant locations, it says.