Back Office Application Support and Modernisation

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            "name": "Post Office Limited",
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        "title": "Back Office Application Support and Modernisation",
        "description": "The Back Office IT services contract covers the end-to-end hosting, operation and maintenance of Post Office Limited (POL) core applications and platforms (excluding the Horizon System and Services). This includes business-critical systems supporting finance and ERP, human resources, master and reference data, management information and reporting, integration services, and process automation. These workloads are primarily delivered from the cloud and include a mix of applications, data, integration, and platform services that collectively underpin POL's day-to-day operations. The service encompasses responsibility for the secure, resilient, and performant operation of the estate throughout the contract term. This includes the ongoing support of live production services, maintenance of legacy systems where required, operational monitoring, incident resolution, change and release activity, and business continuity arrangements. The service is designed to allow the Post Office to consume these capabilities as a managed outcome, without the need to directly operate or support the underlying applications or infrastructure. Alongside steady-state operations, the service includes working in partnership with Post Office to support continuous improvement and technology evolution. This includes platform optimisation, automation, and prepare and conduct application modernisation, migration or decommissioning as POL's business and technology landscape evolves, while ensuring services remain secure, compliant, and fit for purpose.",
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        "procurementMethodRationale": "Post Office Ltd intends to directly award this contract under Section 41 of the Procurement Act 2023, relying on Schedule 5 (Direct award justifications) paragraphs 5 and 6 \"Single suppliers\" grounds because: 1. Only Accenture holds the necessary intellectual property rights for certain proprietary tooling, security operations and bespoke services support wrap that are essential to the safe operation of the current Services . Only Accenture can provide these elements of the Services during the term of the directly awarded contract; and 2. Accenture is the only supplier capable of delivering the Services during the period of the directly awarded contract. No other supplier has the requisite know-how and technical understanding of the bespoke system to support the existing Services during the term of the directly awarded contract. The tooling and support services are deeply embedded into the current operational model, including monitoring, alerting, automation, patching workflows, incident response etc. These services and tools are not currently documented, modularised or abstracted in a way that would allow straightforward transfer to an alternative supplier. Transitioning away from these services and tools would require parallel design, implementation, validation and handover activity, which is non-trivial and could not be safely achieved during the term of the directly awarded contract. Only Accenture could do this work while safely continuing to provide the Services to enable another supplier to take over the system. The direct award is both necessary and proportionate, and limited to the period required for Post Office Ltd to prepare and conduct a competitive procurement for future service transformation. POL requires a supplier to provide the Services while conducting preparatory transformation design work. The Services include a complex mix of infrastructure as a service and platform as a service, components, integrations with Horizon (Post Office's electronic point of sale (EPOS) system) and numerous third party and internal systems, and tightly coupled identity, networking, security, logging, and monitoring dependencies embedded within Accenture's proprietary service wrap. There are no reasonable alternatives to the Services because no alternative provider could technically assume responsibility for the service wrap at this time without substantial redevelopment and high-risk of operational disruption. Initiating a change of provider during a period of significant business and operational change would therefore pose a substantive risk to service continuity and the stable delivery of core functions. The Services are critical to the ongoing operation of POL's business. POL cannot accept any gap in the continuity of the Services. Since only Accenture is capable of providing the Services during the period of the directly awarded contract, there is no reasonable alternative to the direct award.",
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