National Pensions Administration Software.

Descriptions

A number of Local Government Administering Authorities, have commenced a collaborative initiative, to create a Framework for the provision of software solutions, to administer the below schemes:— Local government pension scheme (English and Welsh and/or Scottish and/or Northern Ireland equivalent pension schemes),— Police pension scheme (English and Welsh and/or Scottish and/or Northern Ireland equivalent pension schemes),— Fire and Rescue pension schemes (English and Welsh and/or Scottish and/or Northern Ireland equivalent pension schemes).The Founder Members, in no particular order, are as follows— Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council Pension Fund,— South Yorkshire Pension Fund,— Norfolk County Council,— Essex County Council,— Bedford Borough Council,— Nottinghamshire County Council,— Lambeth Borough Council,— Cheshire West and Chester Council,— Hampshire County Council,— Kent County Council.Kent County Council shall be acting as the Lead Authority for the purposes of this procurement process and the resultant Framework Agreement.An open procurement process is to be followed and a multiple supplier framework will ultimately be let.The framework is to be created so that upon completion of the procurement process, 'any administering authorities and any of their participating employing authorities as defined in the Local Government Pension Scheme (Administration) Regulations 2008/239 and the Local Government Pension Scheme (Administration) (Scotland) Regulations 2008 as amended by SSI 2001/349, and the Committee (NILGOSC) and employing authorities as defined in the Local Government Pension Scheme (Administration) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2009/SRNI 2009/33, will be able to call off from the framework where they require a contract for services contained in the Specification.The Specification has been designed in a modular format in order that Administering Authorities may contract with a single supplier for any number of available modules within their overall operating system e.g. Workflow, Imaging Payroll etc.The system needs to offer the necessary functionality to cover the entire pensions life cycle, as well as features that are regarded as best practice within the industry (such as document imaging, integrated workflow and web access).The supplier will:— be required to identify, interpret and implement all relevant legislation to ensure the system is fully compliant with the law,— have an existing end-client base for one or more of the schemes,— be capable of providing a fully managed system solution (e.g. disaster recovery). The Lead Authority desires that the Framework encompasses a broad description of scope so that any additional requirements that we may have in the future, or those potentially experienced by other authorities but already addressed by the Lead Authority, fall within scope.As a consequence the requirements described in the Tender document are not an exhaustive list.Award CriteriaAny appointment to the Framework Agreement following this procurement process will be made on the basis of the offer that is the most economically advantageous. The Award Criteria are:— Quality 60 %— Price and Cost 40 %These will be further broken down as indicated in the table below:Quality 60 %Criteria WeightingCore Pensions Functionality 10 %Electronic Document Management Functionality 7 %Workflow Functionality 7 %Pensioner Payroll Functionality 5 %Member Access Functionality 5 %Employer Access Functionality 5%Services including:— Implementation approach;— Support and maintenance services;— Hosting Services; and— Ongoing Customer Management. 20 %Technical Architecture and Compatibility 1 %Where the assessment of the evaluation criteria includes responses to a number of questions, for the purposes of evaluation, all of those questions carry an equal weightingPrice 40 % is assessed against five (5) pricing scenarios, each of which is worth 8 % of the total 40 % available for price.Please see Invitation to Tender document for further description of the evaluation and scoring methodologies.