Public procurement notice: Modification Of A Contract/Concession During Its Term
Published: 2021-12-15
Buyer: The National Shared Services Office (NSSO)
Country: IE
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Open procedure
CPV classification: 48000000 | 48200000 | 48400000 | 48600000 | 48700000

Technical requirements: Υπηρεσίες τεχνολογίας των πληροφοριών: παροχή συμβουλών, ανάπτυξη λογισμικού, Διαδίκτυο και υποστήριξη
Request for Tenders for the Provision of a new Single Financial Management Solution for the Irish Civil Service Financial Management Shared Service Centre
Single Financial Management System for the Irish Civil Service Financial Management Shared Service Centre
Request for Tenders for the provision of a new Single Financial Management Solution for the Irish Civil Service Financial Management Shared Service Centre. Open competition that yielded two tender responses.
RFT for the provision of a new Single Financial Management Solution for the Irish Civil Service Financial Management Shared Service Centre.
The work has become necessary as a result of design changes and increments required to deliver the bespoke Solution, and a revised/new implementation plan and approach. All of this has resulted in significant delays to this critical programme, which will replace 31 legacy systems.
A change of contractor at this stage, for part only of the project, cannot be made for both economic and technical reasons and would cause significant inconvenience and duplication of costs for the contracting authority as described below:
(a)	The Programme has already invested significant time and capital in the programme to date - implementation is under way and advanced for deployment of the common solution to the first wave of clients. There would be an extensive delay and duplication of costs associated with restarting the Programme in its entirety. The inability of any new contractor to move directly into incremental build and implementation, to the required deployment timeline, would have very serious consequences for the overall programme.
(b)	A procurement process to source a new contractor would be a very lengthy process, and attracting a new contractor in the market is unlikely given:
I.	the project’s complexities and challenges to date (it is a limited market - the original RFT only attracted one other response) and has been made more complex as a result of travel restrictions related to the pandemic;
II.	it is not feasible to design a procurement competition which could allow potential contractors to verify what has been built to date.
In summary, a change of contractor would be completely impractical because no contractor will enter into a contract to build upon an existing solution without inflating both the associated bid and deployment timeline to reflect the risks associated with the unsighted build to date. As such, it would not be a rational decision to make this change at this critical point in the programme.
The NSSO intends to vary an existing contract in accordance with the provisions of Article 72(1) (b) of the 2014 directive for the provision of a Single Financial Management Solution.
The key deliverable is a Single Financial Management Solution (FMS) within a Finance Shared Service Centre, enabled by one technology platform (Oracle) with standardised end-to-end financial processing and one business intelligence system. The Single FMS would replace 31 disparate systems and centralise back-office financial accounting and reporting services for 48 in-scope Public Service Bodies (PSBs).
The complexity of this programme, which transforms how the finance role operates locally within Departments and across Government, has resulted in incremental work as described below.


Winner: Accenture Limited