Public procurement notice: Contract Notice
Published: 2020-03-11
Buyer: Ministry of Defence, DE&S Mat Strat, DE&S Mat Strat
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Open procedure
CPV classification: 48000000
Estimated value: 4600000 GBP
Submission deadline: 2020-04-06
Award criteria: The most economic tender

Technical requirements: Software package and information systems. Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) is a bespoke trading entity and arm’s length body of the Ministry of Defence. It manages a vast range of complex projects to buy and support all the equipment and services that the Royal Navy, British Army and Royal Air Force need to operate effectively. DE&S works closely with industry, including through partnering agreements and private finance initiatives.
DE&S now has a requirement for an Infrastructure as a service + Platform as a Service (IaaS and PaaS) support services supplier to provide a resilient infrastructure and platform for DE&S’ on-premise Oracle Primavera Applications. The hosting will make continued use of the accredited ‘UKCloud’ provided platform and the DE&S owned Exadata machines located and remaining at the Ark Data Centres in Corsham and Farnborough.
Accreditation for supporting official sensitive data classification is a requirement for the production and pre-production environments. The supplier will manage the system and network accreditation processes in accordance with JSP604, taking all reasonable steps to support and maintain the accreditation process with the relevant inputs from DE&S.
In addition to the Infrastructure and Platform service DE&S has a requirement for an application support services contractor to provide a third line resolver group level application support service covering all the Primavera applications in use at DE&S. This support services will include Oracle’s ETL to Primavera Analytics and associated use of Oracle Business Intelligence Server against the application databases used for reporting – e.g. P6, Unifier and Analytics Data Warehouse.
This will include all maintenance of P6 and Unifier configuration at time of commencement of support contract. Allowance will be made for assurance and knowledge transfer for any configuration work undertaken by DE&S’ nominated development contractors within the support contract.
The supplier shall provide expert product and configuration knowledge to address functional issues and answer questions from DE&S’ technical coaches and super users, trained in the use of the products and the modes of working across their respective domains.
The supplier shall be responsible for all security patches and release patches for the Primavera applications, with expectation that DE&S will upgrade to relevant on-premise releases (with policy of consistency across all applications) in the life-time of the contract.
The supplier will work closely with any DE&S nominated development party to support appropriate levels of regression testing and operational acceptance testing, informing all relevant parties of progress and associated risks in the acceptance of the release package (s).
The supplier will play a key role in providing governance over business change and an assessment of application impact, as requested by DE&S.
The supplier will be expected to provide guidance and support of DE&S’ development contractor and effective collaboration is considered pivotal to the success of the future P3M programme. There will be a small team of product-trained DE&S staff responsible for low-medium complexity configuration within Primavera Application Suite (Unifier).
The supplier for application support will also be required to provide a mature UK-based service desk operation, which will act as the prime service desk for P3M Support across all other service elements (second/third line support, IaaS/PaaS service), helping to generate key service metrics and SLA adherence information to DE&S related to incident, service request problem and change management.
Suppliers are required to submit their tenders via the award system which can be accessed using the following URL: https://award.bravosolution.co.uk/p3m/web/project/110/register
The contracting authority considers that this contract may be suitable for economic operators that are small or medium enterprises (SMEs). However, any selection of tenderers will be based solely on the criteria set out for the procurement. The authority reserves the right to amend any condition related to security of information to reflect any changes in national law or government policy. If any contract documents are accompanied by instructions on safeguarding classified information (e.g. a Security Aspects Letter), the authority reserves the right to amend the terms of these instructions to reflect any changes in national law or government policy, whether in respect of the applicable protective marking scheme, specific protective markings given, the aspects to which any protective marking applies, or otherwise. The link below to the Gov.uk website provides information on the Government Security Classification.
Advertising Regime OJEU: this contract opportunity is published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU), the MoD Defence Contracts Bulletin and www.contracts.mod.uk
Suppliers must read through this set of instructions and follow the process to respond to this opportunity.

Eligibility requirements: As per the ITT.

Award value: 4600000