Event services

Tender description

Background: The Houses of Parliament wish to give notice of a potential contract opportunity for an events and tours booking system to cater for the Parliamentary Education and Parliamentary Members Tours Services. The solution will be required to cover four parliamentary areas: Education Visits: Education organisations are able to visit the Parliamentary Education Centre and choose from a package of services which include various workshops and / or a tour of Parliament. Organisations are able to claim travel subsidy (dependent on their education status and distance from Parliament) once within a financial year. Education Outreach: Parliament offers an outreach programme across the United Kingdom which provides parliamentary workshops to students in their local school. A group of Parliamentary Outreach Officers are located across the country and work within set regions to provide this service. Education organisations are able to request and book a session with an Outreach Officer based within their area. Members School Visits: Education Organisations are able to tour the Houses of Parliament and request to meet their Member of Parliament (subject to their availability). Organisations are able to claim travel subsidy (dependent on their education status and distance from Parliament) once within a financial year. Members Tours: Members of the public are able to tour the Houses of Parliament and may request to meet their Member of Parliament (subject to their availability). Note: all services outlined are provided free of charge. Key solution requirements: Functional: — Schedule events, tours and workshops. — Named representative can register on behalf of education organisation. — Capability for customers to book workshops and confirm content required (for example key stage and workshop type) online. — Capability for staff and customers to track, cancel and amend booking online. — Determine if the education organisation is eligible for travel subsidy and deliver appropriate claim forms. — Schedule staff into the events, tours and workshop programme. — Capability to manage complex staff rotas. — Deliver reminder notification to three parties; customer, MP office and Education Bookings Team. — Deliver booking information such as confirmation notification, visiting information and health and safety guidance to the customer. — Generate regular management reports to include (but not exclusive to) the breakdown of visits per region and per constituency, amount of travel subsidy claimed per financial year and amount of booked verses actual visitors per year. — Generate ad-hoc reports. Non- Functional: — Browser based UI and cloud hosted application. — Ability to gather, cleanse, host, (regularly) update schools data from different public data sources. — Ability to host reference data sets for lookup. — Ability to notify/email multiple stakeholders at different booking stages. — Ability to integrate to applications, data sources and APIs in both directions (in and out of the application). — SAML2 based single sign-on for all internal users (staff members) of the application — Custom one time registration process for all new external users (schools) with validation checks and questions. — ‘My Account’ services for external users (schools) including but not limited to ‘Booking History’. — Infrastructure scalability to cope with peak booking durations with 4000 bookings/day. The current environment: The Parliamentary Education Service caters for approximately 215 000 visits per year and this is expected to increase. Tours are currently administered using a combination of SQL-based application, COTS IT solution, MS-Outlook diary management and Excel spreadsheets. The unifying of solutions and processes will enable significant efficiencies and business benefits. Contract length and value: The expected length of contract is an initial three years, plus two 1-year extension options. Depending on the final scope, the total value of the contract is likely to exceed £100,000.00 and is expected to commence in mid-2017. Please note this is a Prior Information Notice and there are no tender documents to download or submit at this stage. If you are interested in this potential opportunity and would like to be kept informed, please submit your expression of interest via our In-Tend procurement portal (https://in-tendhost.co.uk/parliamentuk/aspx/Home) by responding to this Prior Information Notice (listed within Tenders > Current). Please note that the deadline for expressions of interest is 18:00 hours UK time on Wednesday 30.11.2016.