Data Preparation Services

Tender description

The purpose of this ITT is to commission a suitable agency with specialist data processing and tabulation skills to provide NS&I with data preparation/entry services. Tenderers should note that, in order to ensure that the costs incurred by NS&I of sending the completed questionnaires by secure courier are kept to a minimum, the location where the completed questionnaires are to be processed under any awarded contract must be within the Greater London area. As part of NS&I's insight gathering, it carries out both regular and ad-hoc surveys among its customers. Although an increasing number of these surveys are conducted online, some are postal based and therefore there is a requirement for the responses to the surveys to be data entered by an external company on NS&I's behalf. Examples of a regular and an ad hoc questionnaire have been supplied. The questionnaire design and analysis of data is carried out within NS&I, as is most of the free response coding. However, the data entry, including coding of the responses to any occupation questions into social economic group, will be carried out by the data preparation supplier. On occasion NS&I may also require other free response questions to be coded and may require verbatim comments typed up. For each new survey that requires data entry, NS&I provides formatting instructions for the questionnaire. It would also send revised versions when changes are made to any of the questionnaires. The exact quantity of questionnaires is unknown but is likely to be in the region of between 15,000 and 20,000 a year. Approximately, 1,000 questionnaires are sent for data entry on a monthly basis. This represents around 20 to 25 different regular surveys per annum. The ad hoc jobs will tend to consist of between 200 and 2,000 questionnaires to be input; with the average being around 500 questionnaires. However, it has been known for significantly larger surveys to be run once every few years. Any eventual contract would be call-off in nature for an initial term of two years with NS&I's option to extend for a further period of one year.