Please allow me to take this opportunity to congratulate ICT-Works and particularly our Transport Business Unit, hard work that they have put into ensuring that we finally receive our long awaited Taking Over Certificate. This is a significant milestone for our company.
As you are aware, the City of Cape Town Tender was submitted in September 2009, after much deliberation and negotiation, the contract was finally awarded in February 2011, with the project commencing immediately thereafter. The Contract is split into two major phases, namely the project implementation phase, followed by the maintenance and support phase.
During the project implementation phase, from 2011 through to 2018, the contractual requirements changed substantially with multiple variation orders, the delivery of which ICT-Works had to accommodate, often under highly pressurised circumstances. Other challenges included a highly demanding client, ongoing changes in scope, the cancellation of the APTMS contract created further challenges in managing the overall implementation and operations, ongoing delays with station rollouts by the City of Cape Town’s third party contractors, resulted in staggered implementation and operations. In this period there have been several changes of ICT-Works leadership, difficult partner challenges, allegations of corruption by a disgruntled former executive leading to a gruesome investigation that taught us how to better manage our documentation. Through all of these challenges the ICT-Works team persevered to maintain consistency in the delivery of this service, and came out stronger.
The Taking Over Certificate is a contractual milestone which is issued upon completion of the works (project implementation phase). This Certificate was finally awarded to ICT-Works on Thursday, 02 August 2018. At the same time as this Certificate was awarded, so too was the confirmation of the commencement of the seven year maintenance and support phase. This phase involves the maintenance and support of everything we have implemented to date being the end to end AFC solution. This ensures ICT-Works of seven years’ worth of annuity income, allowing us the opportunity to continue to deliver and build on our quality service, as well as build on our relationship with the City of Cape Town. This further gives us a strategic advantage over our competitors with respect to the forthcoming Phase 2 and other opportunities in the rest of South Africa and Africa.
This has been one of our most complex projects, making this an extremely significant milestone. Therefore please allow me, on behalf of our Board and our Exco, to congratulate this team.