Air Engineers Toolkit (AET) Application

Concepts

• air engineers
• bristol
• information technology
• complex air safety digital services
• air engineers toolkit
• support’s air safety
• related digital application requirement
• air engineers’ toolkit
• defence equipment and support’s air safety
• comprehensive digital solution

Location

United Kingdom: United Kingdon

Description

MOD – DE&S Request for Information (RFI) – Air Engineers’ Toolkit (AET) Application Deliver a comprehensive digital solution to support complex Air Safety Digital Services – access, workflow management, dashboard reporting, data migration and the integration into current systems within the Defence Equipment and Support environment. Object of the Request for Information: Purpose: To assess the core capabilities in the marketplace and whether those capabilities may meet the needs of this RFI. Short description of requirement: Early Market Engagement to establish the solutions available to Defence Equipment and Support’s Air safety related digital application requirement. This RFI is focused on digital solutions that could satisfy some (or all) of the technical elements of the programme. Further seeking to get a better understanding of the costs associated with available options and market-based advice and intelligence to help direct our activities towards best practice. Responses should be sent to Ryan.Miller731@mod.gov.uk and Laura.Crowe104@mod.gov.uk by 17:00 on 16 December 2022. Information Requested Disclaimer: The information contained within this RFI is requested to inform a potential future procurement strategy. No formal procurement process has been launched. Any resulting procurement will be conducted competitively, and all information provided in response to this RFI will be held in confidence. You must not take this Request for Information to mean confirmation that the Authority shall launch a procurement or award a contract for this requirement. The Authority is publishing this announcement without any commitment to issue a tender or place a contract. Accordingly, any expenditure, work or effort undertaken before contract award is a matter solely for the commercial judgement of potential suppliers.

CPV Codes

• 72000000 - IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support

Other Information

** PREVIEW NOTICE, please check Find a Tender for full details. ** Context Brief: Defence Equipment & Support Air Environment are seeking software solutions that will enable standardisation across business processes and development of a single application delivering a common interface for the workflow management and task tracking of Airworthiness activities for multiple Air Delivery Teams and associated stakeholder communities across the organisation, to satisfy Military Aviation Authority (MAA) regulations. Defence Equipment & Support are exploring the use of enterprise type product(s) that can be used in a MOD Cloud environment and are almost entirely configured with little or no customisation to better enable the vision of “One robust, evergreen, integrated, set of digitally enabled services, that provide world class delivery for Defence Equipment & Support. To support the requirement, we have several areas with varying levels of complexity to be considered: • User numbers – 6500 of both internal and external users. • Concurrent Users – 250 • Number of Processes – 19 Processes (These processes cannot be defined in isolation, as there are multiple relationships between them) • Order of Complexity: o Integration with internal and external environments. o User access from internal (MODNet) and both Restricted LAN Interconnect (RLI) and Internet. o Configuration, amendments, and changes would be required over the lifetime of the product. o Importing and exporting data from various tools. o Designing and implementing mandatory changes from MAA. o Significant amount of reporting, both for process and state management as well as governance and eDiscovery. The latter is to support audit/investigation if an air safety issue occurs and BAU daily activities cannot be interrupted. • Data Migration – approx. 14tb, of this we assume that 83% (11.6TB) of this data is related to documents and 17% (2.4TB) is application data. • User Migration (from multiple sources) and transition to new service. • Reports and Dashboards: o Internal reporting to evaluate statistics of user groups (number of closed items, records to be actioned, approaching due dates, etc) o Dashboards that summarise to the user/team the workload ahead, items due to be actioned, overdue actions, etc. o Working Group meetings and reporting to Senior management regarding Airworthiness or Safety, for which users have to gather information (e.g., Extract of Type Airworthiness Safety Assessment (TASA) [/SAR] Claims; ADH Risks to Life from Equipment Contribution to Risk to Life (ECtRtL), evidence against a claim etc...) To allow a degree of operational context and understanding of scale, please use the following qualifiers: Key Functional Requirements: FR1: Number of application users - The application will support approximately 6500 user base of individuals users. The application requires support of a concurrent access user base of approximately 250 individual users. FR2: Workflow Management - The application will enable teams to manage, assign and track tasks in an efficient and consistent way. FR3: Associated entities - The application will enable users the ability to create associations between records and have hierarchical visibility of the entities. FR4: Audit History - The application will provide a fully comprehensive detailed audit trail of activity. FR5: Artefact Management - The application will enable management of multi-media artefacts to the relevant record. FR6: System Architecture - Enable the system administrative authority role to perform routine tasks and user permissions that align with the CRUD matrix (Create, Read, Update and Delete). Majority of this section should aspire to be automatable. FR7: Permissions and Roles - The application will enable the system administrative authority role to perform routine tasks and user permissions that align with the CRUD matrix (Create, Read, Update and Delete). Majority of this section should aspire to be automatable. FR8: Dashboard and Reporting - The application will enable the AET Application to create and provide Management Information type reports across different platforms (reporting will be permission based). FR9: Complexity of data - The solution is expected to be able to store and manage all data for the entire AET solution. Further it must be able to present this data such that end users are able to interact with the right level pertinent to their role or permissions level. FR10: Search - To cover the functionality requirements needed to allow users to search and locate particular records, documents, entities, issues within the AET Application (Search will be permission based). FR11: Forms - To cover the functionality requirements needed for the creation, updating and structure of forms within the AET Application. FR12: Export - To cover the functionality requirements needed to allow users to export certain documents or record information in different formats. FR13: Notifications - To cover the functionality requirements required to enable effective management of a user’s actions and notifications. FR14: Actions - To cover the functionality requirements that enable users to create, assign and close action tasks relevant to the entity, issue or record they are working on. Key Non-Functional Requirements: NFR1: Accessibility - The ability of the product to ensure that any devices, services, or environments employed are usable by people with the widest possible range of abilities, encompassing both "direct" and "indirect" access and technologies. NFR2: Compliance - The adherence to all relevant laws, policies, regulations and governance applicable to the product. NFR3: Confidentiality - The ability of the product to ensure the protection and correct handling of any sensitive, confidential, or regulated information. NFR4: Continuity - The ability of the product to continue at a given level of functional operation subject to a system outage, environmental failure or other significant persistent malfunction or loss of service. This includes Disaster Recovery, Fault Tolerance, Resilience. NFR5: Credibility - The ability of the product to ensure the objective and subjective components of the believability of source data or messages are maintained, credibility is composed of two key components: trustworthiness and expertise NFR6: Data Protection - The ability of the product to ensure information is processed appropriately for operational use, while ensuring adherence to the laws and regulations concerning access, retention and storage of data. NFR7: Deployment - Measures and considerations around the product deployment process, including the frequency and urgency of updates and releases, and existence of test and training environments NFR8: Ease-of-use - The degree to which the product can be used by specified users to achieve quantified objectives with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a quantified context of use. This includes Usability. NFR9: Integrity - The ability of the product to ensure the maintenance and assurance of the accuracy and consistency of data over its entire life cycle. NFR10: Interoperability - The ability of the product to communicate to other internal and external systems through known mechanisms, by applying recognised and accepted protocols and standards. NFR11: Manageability - The ease with which administrators can monitor the product, through critical health status exposed through its monitoring capabilities, in compliance with domain frameworks and policies. NFR12: Modularity - The ability of the product to emphasise the separation of functionality into independent, interchangeable modules, such that each contains everything necessary to execute only one aspect of the desired functionality. NFR13: Non-repudiation - The ability of the product to ensure proof of the authentication, integrity and origin of data, and to validate it is genuine with a high confidence. Includes auditability. NFR14: Performance - The ability of the product to achieve one or more tasks or processes, estimated in terms of accuracy, efficiency, throughput, response time and speed of execution. NFR14: Portability & Compatibility - The diversity of the hardware and software platforms on which the information system can run, and how easy it is to transfer the system from one environment to another. NFR15: Recoverability & Backup - The ability of the product to be recovered back to a functionally operative state within a given time frame and given amount of effort. NFR16: Reliability, Availability, Durability, Robustness - The probability that the product will operate without failure for a specified number of uses (transactions) or for a specified period. NFR17: Scalability & Capacity - The ability of the product to handle an increase in workload without performance degradation, or its ability to quickly enlarge the architecture to accommodate more users, more processes, more transactions, and additional nodes and services as the business requirements change and as the system evolves to meet the future needs of the business. NFR18: Security - The ability of the product to provide adequate levels of secure access and protection of data, includes physical security of systems and security of information held on them. NFR19: Service activity monitoring, Service Operations - The ability of the product to log and measure the use of its capabilities in relation to service efficiency, security, auditing, etc. for improvement purposes. NFR20: Serviceability (includes Adaptability, Maintainability, Modifiability, Supportability) - The ability of the product to go through changes with a fair degree of effortlessness. This attribute is the flexibility with which the product can be modified, for fixing issues, or to add new functionality with a degree of ease. These changes could impact components, services, functionality, and interfaces when modifying for fixing issues, or to meet future demands. NFR21: Utilisation - The degree to which the service will be consumed, expressed in terms of total user numbers, concurrent user access, time frames, frequency of access etc. QUESTION SET: Solution 1. Does your company offer a solution which meets the Key Functional and Non-Functional Requirements above? 2. What type of technology/technologies is your solution based upon? 3. Specify if the solution is compatible with the following: a. MoD Cloud (Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure) Licensing 4. What is your product licencing schema / model(s) and indicative licencing for the product, including any volume / enterprise licencing model and blocks of concurrent users? 5. Are there any additional software / services that are required to support your solution? Application Support 6. Detail support packages for the product you offer, including: a. Expected response times. b. Daily support coverage. Include these in both local time and in GMT. c. Value added services and upgrades. d. Change Requests to configure/add/amend. Interoperability / Data Exchange Standards 7. What technologies does the solution use to support data exchange with other Defence systems? Include supported data exchange formats and methods of data exchange, such as Web services and APIs. 8. Does your product have the ability to perform all the capabilities detailed in the Key Functional Requirements listed above? If not, what is the level of effort (and approximate cost) associated with adding the capability? 9. How is custom development done within the confines of the product? Training 10. Detail any training package or capability you offer, both as part of implementation and how training would be approached once service is implemented as an on-going requirement or post-delivery of any adaptive changes. Delivery and Migration Model Schedule 11. What would be your estimate for the time taken from Project Initiation to delivery? 12. What is your typical implementation model? 13. Can you provide information of your approach to complex data migration where data is migrated from legacy systems to your solution? 14. For an implementation of this size and complexity, can you provide typical / indicative migration and implementation timescales to full deployment? Data Security 15. Do you hold relevant Security clearance to be able to deliver this type of solution? 16. Will any solution comply with GDPR Regulations? 17. What are the IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) arrangements for your products? 18. Do you have experience managing data from partnering Defence Nations and working within their governance protocols (ITAR)? Pricing 19. Based on the level of complexity described are you able to provide: a. Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) pricing in £ GBP, ex VAT, b. A breakdown of the product, implementation, configuration, training and support. c. Details of any foreign exchange rate used to generate the £ GBP figures, if applicable. 20. Identify any other costs and pricing in order to deliver the service or solution. Assumptions and Dependencies 21. Provide any assumptions and dependencies you have made in compiling this data, including your expectation of MOD or it's delivery agents such as DE&S to avoid duplication of any functional roles or responsibility. Further details on the AET Overview and process modules can be found in the '20221114 Air Engineers Toolkit_RFI_Appendix' within the Opportunity Listing (https://contracts.mod.uk/esop/guest/go/opportunity/detail?opportunityId=55159) The Contracting Authority intends to use an e-Tendering system in this procurement exercise, please visit www.contracts.mod.uk for full details and to register your interest in this procurement.