WRITTEN ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS RECEIVED

Transcription

1 WRITTEN ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS RECEIVED All written questions are reproduced in the same format as submitted by the Respondent. IT denotes technical question and response DP denotes purchasing or admin question and response. Question #1 Answer #24 in Amendment No. 3 states that the department s intent is the amount at risk should be calculated as the % point missed or fraction thereof times the penalty amount. There is then an example provided using SLE-011 and the calculation of amount owed based on a 98% service level being achieved. However, if the volume of occurrences is expected to be only a single occurrence in any given month, a single miss of a service level expectation would result in incurring the full potential penalty amount (a full 100 point penalty) not a fraction of it. Using SLE-004 as an example; it is highly unlikely that more than one Severity 1 System Outage during business hours would occur in a single month based on the operation of MFMP to date and based on industry standards for system operations. If the response time exceeded the 30 minute expectation, even by a few minutes, it would result in the service level for that month being 0%. The resulting financial penalty would then be equal to $10,000 X 100 (since the achieved level was 0% based on the single occurrence) or $1,000,000. In order to avoid significant increases in overall costs for the MFMP service, will the State consider setting a maximum per month financial penalty for the following SLEs which would fall into this category to prevent pricing receiving pricing proposals which account for these potentially onerous penalties: SLE-004, SLE- 005, SLE-006, SLE-007, SLE-008, SLE-009, SLE-011, and SLE-012? Answer #1 See Amendment No. 5. Question #2 Answer #2 Item a) 5) under Description of Solution on page 21 states that DMS aims to lessen the burden on procurement staff of administrative functions associated with the eprocurement solution. Could additional details and examples be provided regarding the types of administrative functions referenced? The Department is interested in a solution with more automated processes. Question #3 Answer #3 Question #4 Answer #4 Per item 4 under Potential MFMP Improvement Projects on page 82 (Automate the electronic posting of solicitations created in Sourcing to the VBS), the ITN notes that DMS must currently duplicate work by manually posting solicitation information from Sourcing to VBS. It also notes that other agencies post solicitations directly to VBS and that DMS is the only agency currently using Ariba Sourcing. Could additional details be provided on current solicitation procedures, such as a mapping or diagram of the current Solicitation process flow? A diagram outlining the MFMP Procure-to-Pay process is included in the MFMP business case Section MFMP Procure-to-Pay Process. Please describe the functional differences between e-quote functionality and Ariba Sourcing events and the differing business needs for each. In which MFMP application is e-quote functionality currently available? The MFMP equote functionality is in the Ariba Sourcing application, and leverages the Ariba Sourcing Quick Quotes. In terms of Billing and Collections, how does DMS currently manage delinquent vendors? Will Question #5 DMS or the Service Provider be responsible to follow up on delinquent accounts? What types of penalties does the State use to assist with the collection of delinquent accounts? The Service Provider will be responsible for following-up on delinquent accounts to try to

2 Answer #5 Question #6 Answer #6 Question #7 Answer #7 Question #8 Answer #8 Question #9 Answer #9 Question #10 Answer #10 Question #11 Answer #11 Question #12 Answer #12 Question #13 collect unpaid fees for accounts that are up to 120 days past due. At 120 days all delinquent accounts will be turned over to the State s collections vendor. The Service Provider will be responsible for coordinating with the collections vendor on any payments made in order to update the vendors MFMP account to reflect the balance. Could additional details be provided on the services utilized from Aravo and the procedures surrounding catalog management? How many new catalogs are loaded per month? How many catalog updates are loaded per month? The Department currently has approximately 400 vendor catalogs loaded in MFMP and Aravo, as either line items, punch-outs or ordering instructions. Catalog update frequency depends on the terms and conditions of each State Term Contract the Department awards. For example, some State Term Contract contracts allow for quarterly updates and others annual, and others none. In the last 6 months, updates have been made to approximately 45 catalogs. 7 new catalogs were created and 38 catalog updates were made. CM-007 on page 64 states The Service Provider shall also provide a mechanism to audit punch-out pricing not maintained in the Aravo module. What is the current mechanism and process for auditing punch-out pricing? Currently, MFMP produces a monthly csv file of all punch-out items purchased through MFMP. The report is accessible by the Department s Contract Mangers. The Department s Contract Managers manually compare the items and pricing from the MFMP report to their agreed upon vendor price list. How is reference data (user data, billing and shipping addresses, accounting data, etc.) currently created and loaded into Ariba? Some reference data, such as user data and shipping and billing addresses are manually added by each agency system administrator. Other data, such as accounting data, is added through the nightly interface with FLAIR. Please describe the data interface between VIP and Ariba, including timing/frequency of data transfer and the technical mechanisms currently in place. Is this a real-time interface, a nightly data load, etc? The interface between VIP and Ariba occurs through a nightly data load. VIP updates Ariba with high-level registration information and location level data for any new or updated vendor registrations. How often are Ariba Service Packs applied to the current Production environment? Is Ariba s 12- week cadence for Service Packs followed? Are full regression tests executed for Service Pack testing? Due to the high level of customizations, MFMP does not apply services packs often. MFMP averages applying service packs less than 1 per year and none during upgrade years. Full regression tests are executed any time a service pack is applied. How are maintenance releases and enhancement releases currently scheduled for production? Monthly? Bi-monthly? Quarterly? Maintenance releases occur bi-monthly. Enhancements are usually included with the maintenance releases unless otherwise recommended by the Department or Service Provider. How many Ariba nodes are currently configured in the current Production environment? Please specify the number of offline nodes, catalog nodes, and online user nodes. The current production environment has 18 online nodes configured. 4 nodes are dedicated to batch jobs and interfaces, 2 nodes are dedicated to catalogs and 12 nodes are dedicated to user traffic and integration. MFMP also has 8 offline nodes. Do any major performance issues or challenges exist in current the MFMP production environment? Answer #13 No major performance issues or challenges currently exist.

3 Question #14 Answer #14 Question #15 Answer #15 Question #16 Answer #16 Question #17 Apps-001 of the ITN states that no major Ariba upgrades are planned for the duration of the new contract. Ariba 9r2 is expected for release in Does DMS plan to forego the 9r2 upgrade? The Department recognizes Ariba s evolving strategy for both the on-demand and onpremise solutions. The Department will work with the Service Provider and Ariba to determine the Department s plan and will make decisions based on the plan and features available in the future. Apps-03 states The Service Provider will maintain a development environment at their physical site, to include the necessary software tools and hardware, to support, maintain, and enhance the Ariba suite, the VIP applications, and any other systems used in the operations of the MFMP program, the monitoring of system health and availability, and the monitoring of system transactions to verify successful completion of these transactions. a. Please confirm whether the Service Provider is expected to keep a development environment that mirrors the Production environment at the Service Provider s site or separate data center? Does that mean the service provider is required to procure all of the software tools used in production for the development environment? b. Is system monitoring software expected to be hosted and executed from within SSRC or externally at the Service Provider s site or separate data center. The Service Provider shall determine a development environment sufficient to perform maintenance, development, and monitoring activities to ensure ongoing stable performance for operational processing. Will current monitoring scripts and Sitescope/BAC monitors be included/transitioned to the new Service Provider? Will the current Operational manual be provided? Sitescope and BAC are available for continued use by the Service Provider. See Modification 6 Section V of the current contract for provisions relating to the transfer of intellectual property, technology, and software developed, acquired, or utilized, for the system. Current operational steps will be discussed during transition, but the current Operations Manual may not be provided. For all SLE reports identified in the ITN, will current requirements and templates be provided? Answer #17 Question #18 Answer #18 Question #19 Answer #19 Question #20 The Department currently receives one report for all SLEs and that template can be made available during transition. The Respondent, as part of their response in Tab D, should describe a plan for performing the service level expectations and meeting the requirements. Respondents should include methodologies that will be applied, automation tools planned for use, resource usage plan/approach, and processes that will be put in place. PM-004 on page 33 lists required spend analytics and system utilization reports. Are these in place today? If so, will these be transitioned to the new Service Provider? If not, could the State please denote which are existing reports and which are new reports? The reports described in PM-004 are in place today. These reports have varying levels of automation and will be transitioned to the Service Provider according to the transition plan. See Modification 6 Section V of the current contract for provisions relating to the transfer of intellectual property, technology, and software developed, acquired, or utilized, for the system. The ITN states that SSRC will be responsible under the new contract for all infrastructure services. Under this model, how would SLE-003 through SLE-010 (all relating to availability metrics) be modified as infrastructure has a direct impact on application performance? Both the Service Provider and the SSRC have SLE s to define performance. In the event that it is documented that the SSRC is solely responsible for a missed expectation, the Service Provider s amount at risk will be waived. SLE-010 on page 50 states: Application Response Time during business hours for Ariba Buyer, VIP and Sourcing Average <= 1 seconds between clicks on the application web pages. As customizations are rolled out, this can negatively impact performance and individual application functionality and web pages could have longer load times. How will this be accounted for in the

4 Answer #20 Question #21 Answer #21 Question #22 Service Level terms? As customizations are rolled out, the Service Provider should test for and correct any negative performance impacts prior to releasing the code to production. The Department requests the Respondents describe in Tab D how the SLEs will be measured. SLE-023 discusses workflow updates. Please define workflow updates. Are these programming changes to rules/workflow logic or other modifications such as data changes? Workflow as described in SLE-023 refers to the Ariba approval flow and changes needed to support agency specific approval flows. SLE-016 states that the Service Provider is responsible for complex report creation and delivery within 20 business days. Are these currently developed through Crystal Reports or another tool? What is the approximate frequency of these requests and current report volume? Are these operational or analytic in nature, or both? Answer #22 Question #23 See Section 4.4. B. Reporting and Batch Jobs. The frequency of these requests is less than 10 per month. Current report volume can be found in Section 4.4. B.1 Description. Both operational and analytic reports are requested. Apps-019 discusses fulfillment of production and ad-hoc report requests. Are these currently developed through Crystal Reports or another tool? What is the approximate frequency of these requests? Are these operational or analytic in nature, or both? Answer #23 See Answer #22 Question #24 Answer #24 Question #25 Answer #25 Question #26 Answer #26 Question #27 Answer #27 Question #28 According to the ITN, the current custom billing and collection system (BCS) is intended to be used for at least the first part of the contract period. Will the current supporting scripts, monitors and documentation for the billing and collection process be transitioned to the new Service Provider? See Modification 6 Section V of the current contract for provisions relating to the transfer of intellectual property, technology, and software developed, acquired, or utilized, for the system. Current operational steps will be discussed during transition, but the current Operations Manual may not be provided. CM-003 states: The Service Provider will participate and lead monthly catalog forecast meetings with the Department. What is the focus of these meetings and what type of catalog information is discussed? This meeting is the monthly coordination meeting between MFMP and State Purchasing to provide visibility into upcoming state purchasing activities including sourcing events and contract and catalog enablement. Will the current license for Information Builders iway middleware allow for integration with additional systems? In other words, is the license based on integration points, or is it a flat license that covers unlimited integration points? The current iway license is a flat license that covers all integration points needed, but is licensed only for the Department s needs. Current software costs are outlined in the ITN. Are there escalations or increases built into the maintenance costs listed that need to be accounted for in the cost estimate for the next four years? The Department has not included in any escalations or increases into the software costs outlined in the ITN. If Pivotal is selected for use by the new Service Provider for Help Desk issue tracking, will existing issues be available for reference? If Pivotal is not selected, will an export of past Pivotal data/issues be provided?

5 Answer #28 Question #29 Answer #29 Question #30 Answer #30 See Modification 6 Section V of the current contract for provisions relating to the transfer of intellectual property, technology, and software developed, acquired, or utilized, for the system. In Process Improvement number 8, supplier diversity, it is mentioned that the Department currently manages a certification process for suppliers where each supplier provides supporting documentation validating their business status. Can the State provide additional details on how the information is requested, verified, stored and then used? Currently, vendors identify themselves as a certified business enterprise (CBE) in MFMP. MFMP then send notification to the Office of Supplier Diversity s (OSD) Vendorstrator system. Vendorstrator tracks vendor names and certification status. The process for colleting documents and verifying certification eligibility is a manual paper based process performed by the Office of Supplier Diversity. The Vendorstrator system is not managed by the MFMP team. Page 40 of the RFP mentions the hot-disaster Recovery Site for MFMP. Page 45 further states, Although the infrastructure will be managed by the SSRC, the site location is available for continued hosting of the DR infrastructure. Estimated annual cost is $6, Please clarify what types of additional costs the State is expecting to see in the ITN Cost Proposal for line Total Disaster Recovery Hosting costs assuming that these costs are already known to the state according to page 45 As part of data center consolidation, Florida Statute calls for the Southwood Shared Resource Center (as a primary data center) to perform managed infrastructure services for systems that use that data center. A goal of the primary data center system in Florida is for agencies or any other users of the data center to maintain resources to perform application development, support, tuning, and maintenance functions, while the data center maintains resources for infrastructure management to include hardware and OS administration and support (including OS level monitoring and configuration), storage provisioning and management, backup and restore operations, network and firewall configuration, DBMS system administration, load balancing, capacity planning and management, and any other services that require root level access or RDBMS system administration access. Responsibilities for DBMS use (in this case Oracle) is shared by both the application team (the Service Provider) and the infrastructure team (the SSRC). Physical database management is the responsibility of the SSRC, and includes installation and maintenance of the DBMS system, links with other major systems and subsystem components (network, security, performance monitoring, etc.), allocating and initializing storage made available by the storage management group, implementing backup, redundancy, and disaster recovery requirements, implementing fallback and failover provisions, monitoring DBMS performance, security, backup and failover status, capacity planning and performance management, responding to incidents relating to DBMS software, tuning physical layer of DBMS or subsystem interfaces, and participating in disaster recovery tests. Logical database management is the responsibility of the application development and support team (the Service Provider), and includes data modeling, interfacing directly with developers and analysts on logical model design, creating and maintaining the physical components of the data model, creating processes to initialize, load and scrub data, creating scripts to load data tables, writing and tuning coded queries and other database procedures, maintaining and enforcing data and coding standards, application database performance and tuning through index management and access techniques, and participating in disaster recovery tests. The division of responsibilities between the applications team of the Service Provider and the SSRC applies to both the systems housed at the SSRC and the disaster recovery site. The Service Provider is expected to ensure that a disaster recovery plan is in place, and that testing of the plan occurs annually - coordinating with the SSRC. The Service Provider will be responsible the all costs associated with the DR hosting organization (e.g. QTS or any other DR provider of choice). These costs may include co-location services (space, power,

6 Question #31 etc.), network/bandwidth costs, hands-on services for physical access needs, off-site storage use, and costs associated with DR testing. SSRC infrastructure management services for the DR location will be billed directly to the Department of Management Services by the SSRC the same as management services of the infrastructure located in Tallahassee. Use of QTS, which is where a DR hot-site is currently configured and tested, is not mandatory. The Service Provider is responsible for ensuring disaster recovery is in place at all times. It is the department s understanding that the current $6000 QTS annual cost is only for the colocation service. Page 45 of the ITN describes that The QTS Disaster Recovery site in Georgia is available for continued hosting of the disaster recovery infrastructure for the Buyer Module at an estimated annual cost of $6,000. Will the State clarify if use of this site is required? Will the State also confirm the estimated cost is $6000 annually as this is well below industry standard pricing for this type of service? Answer #31 See Answer #30 On page 46 of the ITN there is a list of services that the SSRC staff will perform. It appears this list includes not only the physical administration of the servers located in the SSRC and the remote Disaster Recovery location in Suwannee, GA, but will also include the logical administration of those systems, such as: Oracle Database Administration for example tuning and determination and application of indexes Question #32 Ariba and VIP Application Performance Management for example monitoring, testing and related application tuning Ariba System Administration for example executing application configuration management and code deployment activities, which are typically after business hour activities Answer #32 See Answer #30 Cisco Network Administration for example load balancer and firewall activities across the SSRC, QTS, and Project site Will the State clarify the expectations for the Service Provider pertaining to the administration of the Ariba and custom JAVA applications and the Oracle databases? Is the Service Provider expected to provide services rendered by Ariba System Administrators, Cisco Network Administrators, and Oracle Database Administrators?