Original Tender Description
Following an open competition (advertised in the Official Journal of the EU in 2003), the Department of Finance (DoF) entered into a Strategic Partnering Agreement (SPA) with Fujitsu on 29 March 2006 for the provision of Electronic Human Resources and related ICT Services for the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) Departments and a number of non Departmental Public Bodies. The Strategic Partnership Agreement (known as the e-HR) provided an end to end fully managed solution for the provision of payroll & HR services. The system has been heavily customised to align to its users' wide range of HR policies and procedures. The Strategic Partnership Agreement expires on 29 March 2021, however it has become unavoidably necessary to continue to maintain the existing systems and services beyond this point. The Department of Finance intends to modify the Strategic Partnership Agreement in accordance with Regulation 72(1)(b) due to the economic and technical reasons and the substantial duplication of cost and significant inconvenience associated with changing to a new contractor to support the current systems and services whilst the Department procures a replacement solution. This voluntary transparency notice has been published to alert economic operators of DoF's intentions to modify the Strategic Partnership Agreement with effect from the 29 March 2021 for a period of 4 years with 2 further annual options to extend. DoF intends to launch a procurement competition and award a replacement contract for the next generation of HR Services before this modification expires.