Software package and information systems

Tender description

Birkbeck has been using its current integrated HR/Payroll and Finance systems (the latter comprising a core finance system, plus a variety of related systems to maintain data on costing and management for research grants and contracts) for a number of years, and for a variety of reasons the applications themselves now need to be replaced. With the exception of some elemental administrative processes (the creation of electronic purchase orders, the entry of sickness absence data, and some reporting), all users of the systems in scope sit within the central HR and Finance departments. The vast majority of the business processes owned by, or traversing, these areas are currently transacted by email and/or paper. Even where there is devolved use of the legacy systems, there are perceived shortcomings: — Sickness absence recording is not undertaken by individual managers, but by a coordinator role in each department (resulting in the exchange of email and paper, but at a local level). — Purchase orders are created by a reasonably large group of users, but by no means all purchasers. The system is unwieldy and unintuitive, and as such is not suitable for occasional users, many of whom submit paper orders rather than electronic. The College does not currently undertake electronic procurement. — Both systems are Oracle Forms deployed in a browser, which requires specific browser configuration in order to function. The result (in order to stop automatic updates to individual workstations rendering access to the applications impossible) is that access to these applications by Birkbeck staff is provided through a virtual desktop environment. This additional step adds complexity and confusion to the users. Significant investment has been made by the College over the last few years to develop its processes and underlying corporate information systems in the areas of Student Administration and Identity Management. This work has been underpinned by a focus on understanding, improving and implementing repeatable and reliable business processes. In order to frame our approach to corporate information systems (CIS) developments and investments moving forwards, we have developed a CIS Strategy which has been recently endorsed by the College's Strategic Planning Committee (SPC). The strategy (which is provided as appendix C) sets out the guiding principles that we seek to adhere to as we further develop our CIS infrastructure. This project must adhere to the principles outlined in that strategy which is set out in the ITT and appendices for your reference. Key amongst those principles are the following: —We wish to provide access for interaction with data and processes, across all corporate information systems, through a single self-service environment for staff and customers. This is known as our ‘My Birkbeck’ framework which consists of Oracle APEX applications developed in-house. —We wish to orchestrate the vast majority of our business processes, across all systems, using our chosen BPM platform Bizagi. —We wish to provide management information reporting across all systems using our chosen BI tool Tableau. This does not eliminate the need for ad-hoc reporting and data interrogation at a local level. With this in mind we now seek proposals for solutions that provide us with: —A robust and well developed data structure —Excellent user interface experience for ‘core users’ (users in the central services who ‘own’ the business processes) —Reliable processing capabilities (e.g. Payroll calculation) —Comprehensive documented and supported Application Programming Interfaces (API) — likely to be RESTful web services — that will allow us to surface options to manipulate data within our self-service environment (e.g. Update my home address) and also provide integrations with processes managed by our BPM solution.