1
Dutchess County ECM RFP DCP-35-12 Addendum/Comments
(08/08/12)
This document provides an RFP addendum and comments as a result of the August 1 Pre-Bid Conference. There are significant changes; so respondents are advised to review this closely as well as the accompanying responses to vendor questions.
Also note there are updated pricing forms as part of this package. Use this new spreadsheet rather than the original version.
ECM SOLUTIONS AND AFFORDABILITY
The ECM RFP goes well beyond a Document Imaging application; which is just one component of our requirements. It’s important that vendors provide an integrated ECM product and not submit proposals for less advanced or non-integrated products that don’t fully meet the RFP requirements. With that said, million dollar or more proposals (including server/storage hardware spec’d; but not priced) unfortunately are likely beyond what the County can afford. A mid-tier or upper-mid ECM is likely our affordability range in terms of one-time and ongoing costs. Vendors are cautioned in submitting proposals that involve phased features or annual software subscriptions to simply keep the pilot cost lower; but will ultimately exceed the County’s pocketbook. As indicated in the RFP – 1. PROJECT SUMMARY AND GOALS:
Important Note About Funding: Respondents should know that for Capital Projects such as this, the County issues an RFP to establish costs prior to seeking funding from the County Executive and the Legislature. Our goal is to fund the project within three months of selecting a vendor.
Vendors should provide as aggressive pricing as possible as well as projected cost savings information. This will benefit both the County and the selected vendor in assuring funding is approved by our County Legislature. Additionally, we believe other NY counties will need to move to an ECM environment in the coming years. Past experience has shown that Dutchess is looked at by others in our IT directions and solutions.
COUNTY HOSTED AND CLOUD SOLUTIONS
RFP section 1 indicates that the “Dutchess County will consider either solutions that reside on servers at Dutchess County or vendor hosted “cloud” systems”. Below are further details.
2
The County currently hosts virtually all applications at our Computer Center. Vendors that have an ECM product that can be On-Premise or Cloud hosted are encouraged to provide pricing options for both. If doing so include two separate sets of pricing forms and identify advantages/disadvantages of both solutions in your response. Important Note: As stated at the Pre-bid Conference we will not consider On-Premise solutions that are managed and maintained by the vendor.
Please be cautious when considering the submission of an open source ECM package. The County will have a large ongoing investment in both monies and time on the ECM. We will need strong assurances, over the long term, that the open source product will be fully supported, any issues will be resolved in a timely fashion and there is an upgrade path for the software. If you are not confident in assuring the long term viability, then do not bid an open source solution.
25.2 COUNTY ECM DEPLOYMENT STRATEGY
This update replaces the section 25.2 in its entirety.
Fully deploying Enterprise Content Management will be a multi-year initiative that is intended to change a broad range of county operations. We view the ECM as long term “game changer” rather than just a traditional project implementation.
The County’s ECM implementation approach is to first deploy some key groups of documents and workflows across county departments. The premise of this “pilot” component is to get some relatively “quick wins” and buy-in from a broad range of staff. This will help set the stage for future county-wide ECM initiatives. At the same time, during this first phase we will start working within “pilot” departments to design and implement different ECM projects. Some of these will focus on internal department operations and others will involve inter-department workflows and collaboration.
A critical “pilot” project is a review of our County Records Center policies, procedures, workflow and storage. The goals for this review are to:
Reduce reliance on paper records in the Center
Establish a more definitive Records Management policy
Incorporate the ECM into Records Retention to reduce documents stored in Records Center; and eliminate the need for future expansion of the Center. Determine possible “back scanning” of certain Records Center documents.
(The vendor should not include “back scanning” costs in the proposal; time should be allocated just to determine if any back scanning is justified).
3
The County will assign a Project Manager from our Office of Computer Information Systems (OCIS) as well as a Records Center representative to work along side of the vendor on the above Records Center study.
The selected vendor will be expected to play a key roll in all the “pilot” projects. These projects are described in following sections of the RFP.
Under the direction of our Office of Computer Information Systems (OCIS) the County will then pursue follow-on ECM phases and projects beyond the “pilots” listed in the next section. This work will be done by the County, after the vendor completes its work, based on what we’ve learned from the vendor. We will decide on projects based on assessment of potential benefits, business strategies and payback. These future projects will focus on:
Business Processes Automated Workflow Document Collaboration Searching and Retrieval eDiscovery
E-forms, OCR and E-signatures 25.3 “PILOT” PROJECTS
This update replaces the section 25.2 in its entirety.
A. The selected vendor will oversee the implementation of the following “pilot” projects. These are a mix of county-wide and single-agency ECM initiatives. The lead agency is identified next to each project.
1. Policies and Documents (Various Departments) 2. County Contracts Procedures (County Attorney)
3. Insurance Certificates – Also relates to Contracts above (Risk Management) 4. Employee Insurance forms (Risk Management)
5. Civil Service Exams and Recruitment (Human Resources) 6. Employee Records (Human Resources)
7. DPW Highway Work Permits (Public Works) 8. DPW Bids and Change Orders (Public Works)
4
9. Resolutions (County Legislature / County Executive) 10. Permits and Inspections (Health Department)
11. Records Center
B. For each of the above ECM projects the vendor will minimally be responsible for: Assessment of procedures
Workflow Recommendations Design
Training of IT Staff and Select Users (See #9 below for details) Incorporation of ECM
“Initial” Implementation (see below for clarification)
C. As the pilots first involve the study of current processes, we understand that estimating hours to complete a project, without knowing all the requirements, is be a bit difficult. However, we assume that vendors will have past experience with similar functions; so should use this as a guide in estimating the projects. Although the pilots are not fixed priced, please provide reasonable projections. In doing so, assume the following:
1. Our use of the word “pilot” projects simply means that these will be the first ECM projects to be rolled out.
2. Depending on the “pilot” project the vendor will be responsible for working with the County on either the initial implementation of that functional area or the full implementation. Some pilot projects are very broad, involving implementations to many or all departments. For these, the vendor will only be responsible for rolling out the first few “initial” departments. Then, based on the training OCIS has received from the vendor, the County will proceed with the full implementation. The list under item 10. below identifies whether the vendor is responsible for the “FULL” rollout or only the “INITIAL” departments.
3. We expect that all the “pilot projects” may take 18-24 months to complete. Please indicate in your response whether you believe that this is a reasonable time frame.
4. Although the respondents must provide separate estimated hours for each of the pilot projects, we’ll likely be pooling the total hours.
5. All work activities needed by the vendor for an individual pilot should be priced under that pilot. This includes all items in 25B. and possibly some Project Management hours. Please note that with the heavy County involvement (as shown below), we don’t expect that the vendor’s Project Management costs will be a significant portion of the project costs.
5
6. The County’s Office of Computer Information Systems (OCIS) will assign one person to be the Project Manager (PM) to oversee the entire scope of services from the County’s end. This person will be the primary contact to the vendor for all “pilot” projects.
7. The County will assign an OCIS application subject expert for each pilot project along with staff from the departments involved the pilot.
8. OCIS will help document current workflows and participate in other work to improve the implementation and help reduce the costs.
9. The selected vendor will train OCIS staff and just some department users on the ECM product. This train-the-trainer will minimize the number of staff and departments that the vendor will have to train. We would expect the vendor will not have to train more than 40-50 people TOTAL on the use of the ECM.
10. Below is the expected order of the “pilot” projects. We’ve also grouped pilots together that we believe can be done concurrently. These are subject to change based upon the County reviewing the RFP submissions; in which the
respondents are encouraged to comment. Adjustments then may be made to the pricing of the finalists.
Pilot Order Pilot Projects Vendor Implementation
1 2. County Contracts Procedures Initial 3. Insurance Certificates Initial
2 9. Resolutions Full
3 11. Records Center Initial
1. Policies and Documents Initial 4
8. DPW Bids and Change Orders Full 9. DPW Highway Work Permits Full 5 5. Civil Service Exams and Recruitment Partial
6. Employee Records Partial 6 4. Employee Insurance forms Full 7 10. Permits and Inspections Full
Below are descriptions of each of the “Pilot” Projects. (REFER TO ORIGINAL RFP FOR THIS INFORMATION)
6 ECM SOFTWARE (25.4.C)
This update replaces the section 25.4.c in its entirety.
Below is a synopsis of the major ECM software functions that must be included. Refer to the Requirements Checklists for specific requirements.
Major ECM Functions Document Capture/Imaging Different Import Methods Indexing Storage / Archiving Organization Document Control Workflow Collaboration Approvals/ E-signatures Version Control Search/Retrieval
Records Management and Retention eDiscovery
MS Office Integration
Internet and Intranet Integration Interfacing with County Applications
Complete the Checklists and submit them with your proposal identifying specific functions that your system currently has (“have it”); new functions that will be developed for this project (“will have”); and those that will not be included (“won’t have”). You may also attach comments regarding the required functions.
For any item that you marked as “will have” – include a comment (under “Notes” column) indicating when this function will be incorporated into the software.
Software Licensing
We are aware that ECM products have many different licensing models. Some differ in Named Users versus Concurrency; standard user license versus user categories such as “power”, casual and inquiry-only users. We’ve done our best below in providing information for different licensing models. As stated our goal is an “affordable” unlimited enterprise license (both users and scanning stations). As an alternative we’ve decided to have vendors provide a set number of licenses (Named or concurrent) with the County having the option to increase the license incrementally at a fixed cost for a three (3) year period. Below are further details.
7
We’ve provided some statistics below, followed by further details, that will aid you in pricing the ECM software.
County Population 290,000
County Employees 1,925
ECM User License Counts See Below Network Copiers with scanning 144
Dedicated Scanning Stations TBD
The County has identified about 700 office staff and management that could potentially use the ECM; although we would not expect this number of users. It’s unlikely that there ultimately would be much more than 500 users. This would be a combination of staff that will be major contributors to the ECM and many more that will primarily be viewing or simply contributing shared MS Office documents to the ECM.
Due to the large number of County users that will need to access the ECM system, we are concerned about the affordability pricing the software based on individual user licenses. We encourage vendors to submit aggressive pricing options for an Enterprise “unlimited” User License and Scanning Stations as well as discounted pricing for set numbers of Licenses.
Although most ECM products are priced based on User Licenses, we understand that there are other pricing models such as ECM document volumes. Due to the large, varied plans for our ECM, we have no way to provide specific details on the number of documents or pages that we believe will be stored. For products that have volume-based pricing, as identified under the table below, item “4. Specify Cost for Other Pricing Model”: considering: the scale of our implementation, covering all our pilot projects, what you may expect from a minimum of 200 users, and a minimum of 3 years of service. Also under 5. below provide the cost of an additional volume block.
In light of the above, provide the pricing for user licenses as follows. We’ve also identified the pricing spreadsheet form that vendors should include each of the figures.
If User-based Licenses Forms to include the Costs
1. Unlimited License One Time Costs form & Applications SW form 2. 200 Named Users (or 40 concurrent) One Time Costs form & Applications SW form 3. 25 additional block of Named Users
(or 5 concurrent users)
Applications SW Form
If Other Than User-based Licenses
1. Unlimited License One Time Costs form & Applications SW form 4. Specify Cost for Other Pricing Model One Time Costs form & Applications SW form 5. Cost for additional block of _________ Applications SW Form
8
Note: If the product license model has different categories of Users, the response should indicate this --- but provide licenses that will allow each User to at least contribute files to the ECM.
Vendor responses should provide a clear description of your licensing model and user categories proposed (e.g. functionality/limitations under each category).
The County reserves the right to adjust licensing counts after RFP responses are submitted.
26. PROJECTED SAVINGS WITH THE ECM
This update replaces the section 26 in its entirety.
The primary goals for this initiative are cost savings, efficiencies and staff productivity. Especially with the economic pressures that counties are up against, the most important goal is Cost Savings. In order to gain approval for this project and to fund the one-time costs and on-going annual costs, we will need to show costs savings to our County Executive and Legislature.
Based on the vendor’s understanding of this RFP, identify ROI opportunities for onging cost savings by implementing this ECM and the “pilot” projects.
1. Provide specific cost savings and cost avoidance (not just identify areas that the County may save monies.) Include both actual cost reductions and cost avoidance; with actual reductions being the most important.
2. In addition to cost savings; also identify specific improvements, efficiencies and staff productivity gains that are expected to be achieved.
Below are some statistics that may help in developing your estimated cost savings. Also refer to the RFP “Pilot” writeups for other information.
Employee Information Counts
Potential Number of Employees using the ECM
o Clerical/Administrative Staff to use ECM 371
Average Salary and Benefiits $58,978
o Management/Professional Staff to use ECM 311
Average Salary and Benefiits $100,638
Records Center
Percent Full 90%
Square Footage 19,300
Boxes at Records Center 44,677
9
Boxes added per Year 3,120
Department Retrieval Requests per Year 4,920
Other Information
Sheets of Paper purchased in 2011 14,809,000
We can’t overstate the importance of the vendor identifying cost savings for the project.
