Public procurement notice: Voluntary Ex Ante Transparency Notice
Published: 2016-12-01
Buyer: Pandagruppen
Country: NO
Region: NORGE
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Contract award without prior publication
CPV classification: 72212462 | 72212463 | 72514200 | 72514300 | 73200000
Estimated value: 3000000 NOK

Technical requirements: Pandagruppen shall enter into a contract for continual maintenance, operation (system administration) and user support, as well as a framework agreement for development assignments connected to Panda. Panda is short for planning and analysis tool for industry, demography and the labour market and it is an economic-demographic model system developed for use in regional analyses and general planning in counties and groups of municipalities. Panda gives users access to a data basis that is comparable across sectors and administration levels. Regional development relative to other regions and the entire country can be described with indicators/indexes. The system can also be used for individual municipalities, but it does not include data or models for basic districts. The Panda system is currently run and maintained by SINTEF Teknologi og samfunn. Pandagruppen administers the system.
The data basis in Panda is based on the official statistics from Statistics Norway. This ensures a large degree of consistency and comparability between different levels and types of data. Panda is particularly suitable for analysing demographic and industrial economic consequences of events, measures, policies and general development characteristics. Panda includes a statistics bank, a calculation model for population and housing prognoses and a calculation model for industry analyses.
In order to handle the operation, maintenance, user support and development of the Panda system, tenderers must have an environment with very good knowledge of and competence in IT, regional economics and demography and, in addition, research competence will be required for providing user support. This is particularly important as regards solving problems in the system, providing good user support and further developing the model that is in the system and dealing with ordering/receiving and adding data to the system. The system is therefore different to other IT systems, as special knowledge is required of the system's content in addition to IT competence. The system is largely based on confidential data that is provided by SSB and there are strict rules as to who can receive it. Furthermore, tenderers are required to have in-depth knowledge of economic, demographic and political conditions in Norway in order to provide the services. Based on the above, the contracting authority has assessed the market for the provision of these types of services and has not identified any suppliers or groups that have this compound competence. Neither are there any suppliers who have plans to establish this. It is improbable that foreign suppliers fulfil the requirement for in-depth knowledge of economic, demographic and political conditions in Norway. In addition access to confidential data from SSB would be uncertain. We cannot exclude that a Norwegian or foreign supplier could acquire the required competence and get access to the data, either through self-developed competence and/or cooperation with other environments, but the contracting authority deems that this would take time and would not be feasible within the time limit the contracting authority is dealing with in this case. Sintef are users of the system through their research activity and they have developed the system over many years. The system has not been developed as a commercial system with commercial documentation requirements, so a lack of system documentation would also be a technical condition that would exclude other suppliers from providing the service.