Printing and related services

Tender description

HMRC’s objectives are to maximise revenues, improve customer experience and reduce costs in a sustainable way. Our strategy is based on understanding our customers, so we can deliver services tailored to their needs and positively influence their behaviour. HMRC’s digital strategy will help us meet our objectives and specifically states: “The drive to Digital by Default will significantly reduce both the volume of paper produced and sent to customers by mail and the amount coming in to HMRC. HMRC currently issues in the region of 220 000 000 letters (c. 450 000 000 A4 images) to customers each year and receives some 11 000 000 letters for processing. HMRC is looking to procure a set of services that will allow us to continue to send and receive paper output but that also enables us to move towards full multi-channel communication, ultimately reducing the volume of paper that we, as an organisation, has to handle. HMRC currently owns the design of documents in-house within its Digital Services team and has a desire to take ownership of all composition activity (composition for bulk printing is currently performed by a third party supplier) and channel control services. The solution will need to allow us to streamline the processes, so that form / letter creation and change is materially quicker and cheaper, and allows us to create outputs capable of delivery to customers through the channel of HMRC's choice based on customer preferences. This includes, where required, print-ready files to send to production. HMRC already has a long term strategy for managing customer preferences, but would also be interested in looking at options for the short to medium term within the market for a solution to store customer preferences and integrate this to its systems in order to direct communications accordingly. This is the default service for c. 39 000 users who create outputs on their desktops and moves the printing from their local office printers to a centralised print and despatch facility and generates in the region of 13 000 000 letters per year (39 000 000 images) including enclosure of mail and sorting for presentation in general to Down Stream Access mail distribution. The current third party contract for Central Print expires in December 2016. For all output services, HMRC requires the utilisation of the lowest cost postal services available for all qualifying mail. This is the service for print requirements generated out of a number of back end systems and includes enclosure of mail and sorting for presentation to Down Stream Access mail distribution. The current third party contract for Bulk Print expires in June 2017. For all output services, HMRC requires the utilisation of the lowest cost postal services available for all qualifying mail. This service is required for the delivery of communications to customers via email. Whilst the importance of email communications is expected to grow, the volumes are as yet uncertain. Therefore we seek a generic understanding of the options for handling outbound e-mail and the scalability of such solutions. Further, the solution will be required to support the avoidance of emails being identified as spam, the management of bounce-backs and automation of handling to deliver a printed version of the form where this occurs. For all output services, HMRC requires the utilisation of the lowest cost postal services available for all qualifying mail. This is the service for handling incoming mail including the opening of envelopes (mailroom services); batch control and preparation for scanning; image capture, data validation through OCR / ICR techniques, indexing and returning the data file to HMRC into a workflow system. Subsequent storage of paper copies will be required for a limited time before destruction by HMRC's third party provider. Paper to be scanned includes both structured forms (i.e. with boxes filled in) and unstructured material (white mail). HMRC currently processes in the region of 80 000 000 images per year. There are 2 third party contracts for Input services both due to expire in June 2017.