Original Tender Description
The Northern Ireland Assembly Commission (the Assembly Commission) is seeking to procure a single contractor to provide, implement and maintain a cloud hosted SaaS integrated HR, payroll, finance and procurement solution. This is likely to be an off-the-shelf solution with minimal customisations. The procurement exercise will be conducted in accordance with the competitive negotiation procedure pursuant to Regulation 29 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (as amended) (Regulations) (PCR). The Assembly Commission wishes to conduct an efficient, effective and streamlined competitive negotiation process and does not wish to engage in any unnecessary negotiations that imposes costs on all parties and causes delay. Accordingly, it is envisaged that certain limits will be placed on the extent of negotiations that will be permitted. The Assembly Commission will only accept tender bids that propose a solution model that meets the key requirements for HR, payroll and finance and is within our estimated maximum budget of £3M for the entire duration of the contract. A single solution may be proposed by a single contractor or a consortium of suppliers may come together propose a solution, but must be led by a single lead contractor. Alternatively, a series of solutions may be proposed again by one supplier or a consortiums of suppliers, but must also be led by a single lead contractor. To be clear, the Assembly Commission will only enter into one contract for this solution. The lead contractor will be responsible for any other suppliers/sub-contractors with whom they propose to work together to provide a solution for the Assembly Commission. The lead contractor will act as the single point of contact for the Assembly Commission and will hold responsibility for dealing with all contractual matters for the Assembly Commission. As the over-arching objective of the Systems Review Project is a move to having one version of the truth, prevention of duplication of data and access to information across the solution in real time, the decision was taken to appoint a sole contractor to manage, maintain and underwrite the solution configuration who will take overall responsibility for the implementation, maintenance and support of the entire configured solution so that these project objectives are achieved. Awarding multiple contracts or splitting the in-scope functions into separate contracts will not be facilitated. This contract will be awarded to one supplier for a period of 5 years. There will be five optional extension periods of up to one year each. It is the intention that the highest ranked tender submission will be awarded this contract. The Assembly Commission recognise that they are a number of solutions in the marketplace that can provide an integrated solution that will meet our needs. In order to manage expectations of potential Tenderers, the Assembly Commission are placing a cap on the overall IT solution implementation and ongoing licensing, support and maintenance costs over a ten year period of £3m.