SOURCES SOUGHT
D -- Farm Loan Program Information Delivery System (FLPIDS)
- Notice Date
- 8/1/2012
- Notice Type
- Sources Sought
- NAICS
- 541512
— Computer Systems Design Services
- Contracting Office
- Department of Agriculture, Farm Service Agency, Acquisition Management Division, Contracts Operations Branch, 1280 Maryland Avenue, SW, Portals Bldg., Room 508A, Washington, District of Columbia, 20250-0567
- ZIP Code
- 20250-0567
- Solicitation Number
- AG-3151-SS-12-FarmLoanProgramInformationDeliverySystem(FLPIDS)
- Archive Date
- 8/23/2012
- Point of Contact
- MeChelle Dickey, Phone: 202.205.2835, Jeffrey McRae, Phone: 202-690-4030
- E-Mail Address
-
mechelle.dickey@wdc.usda.gov, Jeffrey.Mcrae@wdc.usda.gov
(mechelle.dickey@wdc.usda.gov, Jeffrey.Mcrae@wdc.usda.gov)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- **This is a Sources Sought for all Small Business Concerns** Please respond with your corporate capabilities outlining your firms demonstrated knowledge, experience and any other relevant information associated with the Requirements contained within this Sources Sought that would allow USDA to determine your firms ability to perform the stated support with this level of complexity. To be considered capable, responses must include: 1) Explanation of how your corporate capabilities are evidence of your firm's ability to perform the stated support, with this level of complexity. 2) Statement, including DUNS #, as to whether your firm a Small Business, 8(a), Small Disadvantaged Business, Women-owned Small Business, HUBZone Small Business, Service Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business, etc.? If so, which one? (For additional information on small business concerns visit www.sba.gov) 3) Examples of three similar projects, where firm is the Prime on at least one, which demonstrates your ability to perform. 4) Representative Resumes for the following type of Key Personnel: a. Project Manager b. Senior Systems Architect c. Junior System Architect for Configuration Management support **This is not a Request for Proposal (RFP). This is a Sources Sought only to ascertain the market availability of firms that are Small Businesses only and can provide the support with this level of complexity outlined in this posting and which falls under NAICS 541512.** THE GOVERNMENT DOES NOT INTEND TO AWARD A CONTRACT ON THE BASIS OF THIS SOURCES SOUGHT OR TO OTHERWISE PAY FOR THE INFORMATION SOLICITED. This request for information is for planning purposes only and shall not be considered as an Invitation for Bid (IFB), Request for Quotation (RFQ), or Request for Proposal (RFP), or as an obligation on the part of the Government to acquire any products or services. Your responses to this sources sought will be treated as information only. No entitlement to payment of direct or indirect costs or charges by the Government will arise as a result of contractor submission of responses to this sources sought or Government use of such information. The Government reserves the right to reject, in whole or part, any contractor input resulting from this sources sought. The information resulting from this sources sought may be included in one or more RFP's, which may be released via the FEDBIZOPPS.GOV portal. This is a sources sought announcement only, and is not an intent to procure. A solicitation is not available at this time, and any requests for a solicitation will not receive a response. The USDA FSA is currently conducting market research to determine the availability of qualified small business contractors to address the following requirements: Requirements: Vision Statement The Farm Credit Applications Office (FCAO) provides and maintains Information Technology systems to support American farmer operating and emergency loans, conservation, domestic and overseas food assistance and disaster programs that improve the economic stability of agriculture and the environment. These programs help farmers produce an adequate food supply, assist farmers to compete for export sales of commodities in the world marketplace and keep consumer prices reasonable while caring for the environment and natural wonders. 1 Introduction. The Information Technology Division is responsible for the design and maintenance of information technology (IT) requirements to support the FLPIDS. The Farm Service Agency (FSA) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) seeks a qualified contractor to develop and implement the next phases of the Direct Loan System (DLS) Loan Making, Loan Servicing and Special Servicing components of FLPIDS. In addition, support is required to maintain existing FLPIDS applications including the Farm Loan Program Risk Assessment (FLPRA) system and the Electronic Debt and Loan Restructuring System (eDALR$). 1.1 Mission. The FCAO delivers service to the IT systems for Agency customers. FSA's IT systems are in use through an extensive network of field offices including over 2,500 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Service Centers and 51 State Offices, including Puerto Rico. State and County Office elected committees, comprised of farmers in the local area, are responsible for overseeing FSA services delivered to the farming community. This extensive network enables FSA to maintain close relationships with Agency customers and successfully address customer's needs in an effort to continually improve the delivery of FSA programs. FSA is faced with the challenge of streamlining operations and reducing expenditures, consistent with balanced budget mandates, while maintaining a field office presence sufficient to ensure quality customer service. The goal is to provide our field and national office customers the automation tools to support direct and guaranteed lending loan programs for farm ownership; operating and emergency; conservation and environmental; emergency and disaster assistance; and Community and Business. These programs provide a safety net to help farmers produce an adequate food supply, maintain viable operations, compete for export sales of commodities in the world marketplace, and contribute to the year-round availability of a variety of low-cost, safe and nutritious foods. 1.2 Background. As part of the FSA's vision to expand economic opportunity through innovation and promote agriculture production sustainability, Farm Loan Programs (FLP) provides direct and guaranteed loans to farmers and ranchers who cannot obtain financing through conventional lending institutions. To provide these programs most efficiently, the FLPIDS modernization effort is intended to streamline and modernize current FLP inefficient, duplicative, and paper-based loan making and loan servicing processes and systems and support the USDA Strategic Plan by deploying solutions that are customer focused, collaborative and results oriented. Prior to the implementation of FLPIDS loan making and loan servicing functionality, the FLP assistance was provided through the use of aging decentralized systems on legacy technology no longer supported by vendors creating lengthy processing times, high risk of system failure and high risk of data integrity. By reengineering redundant processes, centralizing and integrating data, and leveraging modern technology, FLPIDS has significantly enhanced the Service Centers ability to provide customer focused program delivery with timely accurate loan closing, real-time payoff amounts and distressed borrower account assistance. The reengineering of FLP systems and migration off of the legacy systems has been on-going for several years. A majority of the functions related to direct loan making, loan servicing, farm business planning business processes and functions related to quality control assessment have already been reengineered and migrated to the web environment. The National Internal Review (NIR) system has been replaced by the reengineered Farm Loan Programs Risk Assessment (FLPRA) system. This system pulls data from other FLP applications and generates various management reports used to identify high risk lending States. Once a service center is reviewed and scored, the data is entered at the State level and the system tracks the scores assigned to Service Centers. Tasks under this PWS shall include limited FLPRA support encompassing annual modification to formulas, calculations, data-sharing between systems and maintenance. Components of the Direct Loan System (DLS) include Loan Making and Loan Servicing. Loan Making business functions have all been reengineered and migrated to a web based environment and all prior business function have been removed from the legacy systems. The first phases of DLS Loan Servicing have been implemented including a web-enabled Customer Management function, web-based Special Servicing and migration of the last component of the distributed IBM AS400 platform for FLP. The Electronic Debt and Loan Restructuring System (eDALR$) is part of the FLPIDS initiative. The eDALR$ application uses existing business services to retrieve and utilize data created by other FLPIDS and non-FLPIDS applications to accomplish its business processes. eDALR$ is an Intranet web-based program developed to assist authorized agency officials in determining and evaluating the effects of primary loan servicing in accordance with FSA Handbook 5-FLP. The eDALR$ completes a series of complex mathematical calculations based on information regarding the borrowers cash flow and loan status. This information is used in attempting to Re-structure the borrower's debt and maximize their repayment ability, while avoiding or minimizing loss to the Government. USDA e-Authentication (e-Auth) is the system used by USDA agencies to enable customers to obtain accounts that will allow them to access USDA Web applications and services via the Internet. This includes things such as submitting forms electronically, completing surveys online, and checking the status of your USDA accounts. The e-Auth is also the authentication method used to access FLPIDS applications by authorized users. Extensible Authorization Service (EAS) is used for implementing role based privileges in FLPIDS applications. All applications delivered by the Contractor must implement e-Auth and EAS to authenticate and apply role based privileges. The last system to be reengineered and migrated to a web based environment is the Program Loan Accounting System (PLAS). PLAS is the legacy loan financial and accounting system for the Farm Service Agency (FSA). PLAS includes an online and batch process system that supports transaction entry and inquiry for over 30 direct loan and grant programs. PLAS utilizes the Integrated Database Management System (IDMS) database and consists of approximately 120 subsystems with 4,000 Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL) and Report Writer programs and reports, and 2,600 Job Control Language (JCL) jobs. National Information Technology Center (NITC), located in Kansas City, MO, currently hosts the PLAS mainframe environment. The NITC failover facility for the mainframe is currently in Boulder, CO. The Rural Development Agency (RD) Operations and Scheduling Branch (OSB) provides operational support for PLAS. NITC is responsible for managing the mainframe while OSB is responsible for running the batch processes. Keeping experienced development resources for PLAS is challenging, forcing FSA to depend increasingly on external contractors. The costs to maintain the mainframe environment have also increased. Part of the mainframe cost calculation is the level of CPU processing. PLAS is mainly a batch process therefore requires a high amount of CPU usage to complete processing during the nightly and monthly batch windows. PLAS is unable to adapt efficiently to the needs of FSA, mostly due to the mainframe architecture and limited system extensibility. Over the last 6-7 years as the Direct Loan System (DLS) development effort has subsumed all of the distributed systems previously supporting Farm Loan Programs, a strategy of replacing PLAS and the online transaction input system called the Automated Discrepancy Processing System (ADPS) which supports PLAS has been executed. Initially the plan has been to retire the online subsystems based on the functional linkage they had to the distributed systems that were being replaced. That strategy is continuing however more emphasis will be placed under this contract on the design and development of the replacement of non-accounting functions in the PLAS Cobol based system with the DLS system. 1.3 Scope. The primary goal is to acquire information technology support services for continued development and enhancements of FLPIDS Production systems. The nature of work sought under this task order consists of contractor resources required for the continuation of the FLPIDS Project, discrete deliverable completion, and the finalization of the migration from the legacy systems. This work will include requirements gathering, design, prototyping, development, testing, and deployment process and require personnel with, but not limited to; Project Management, MS SQL2008, Oracle, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Hyperion, Agile Development Process, TDD and Code Refactoring, UML Modeling, IDE (Eclipse), Maven, Continuous Integration Server (Hudson), WebSphere, JBoss, J2EE( JNDI, JMS, EJB (2.0 to 3.0), RMI etc), Web Services, Struts (1.0 to 2.2), Hibernate, Spring (Webflow, MVC, IoC, AOP, Transaction Management etc), JPA, Java (5.0 and 6.0), Javascripts, Network Security and Network Communication Protocols skills. Compliance with FSAs System Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Architecture and Management Center (AMC), Information Bulletin and development and configuration change control standards must be followed. The standards are publically available at http://www.fsa.usda.gov/FSA/sdlcapp?area=home&subject=landing&topic=landing or can be provided to the contractor by the Contracting Officer Representative (COR) upon request. The Contractor shall provide maintenance support for all Production FLPIDS (Loan Servicing, Loan Making, Customer Management, Special Servicing, DRT, eDALR$ and FLPRA) Enterprise Archive (EAR) files to keep the application running smoothly. The contractor shall work on defect fixes for any defects that stop FLPIDS from functioning in the Production Environment. The contractor shall provide production support for any newly developed EAR's for at least one year after production implementation. It is the intent of the government to transfer the maintenance functions from the contractor to the government. To that end the contractor will be required to provide analysis support and will review application modifications made by the government to ensure that those modifications integrate with the other applications within DLS. Benefits include:  Delivery of Mission Critical Farm Loan Programs.  Satisfaction of e-Government requirements.  Centralization and integration of data  Provide for delivery of new Farm Bill applications.  Leveraging of modern technology  More efficient program delivery eliminating trips by the producer to the local Service Center  Improve data quality. Current challenges include:  Providing scalability necessary to meet the increasing demands from ongoing Modernization efforts  Maintaining Farm Loan Program delivery dates for Mission Critical Farm Loan Programs.  Managing the differences in the development of applications such as languages, standards, FSA Reference Architecture and frameworks. Applications are hosted on the Web Farm located in Kansas City.  Number of business partners contributing to the design and development of Production FLPIDS.  Data collections and data verification requirements for data conversions Each response shall be reviewed by the Contracting Officer/Specialist and Program Office for the purpose of determining whether there exists reasonable expectation of obtaining offers from responsible small businesses that are competitive in terms of market prices, quality and delivery. A determination not to compete the proposed procurement based upon responses to this notice is solely within the discretion of the Government. All information furnished to the Government in response to this notice will be used for determination of sources only.
- Web Link
-
FBO.gov Permalink
(https://www.fbo.gov/spg/USDA/FSA/MSD/AG-3151-SS-12-FarmLoanProgramInformationDeliverySystem(FLPIDS)/listing.html)
- Place of Performance
- Address: USDA/FSA/ITSD/FCAO, 6501 Beacon Drive, Kansas City, Missouri, 64133, United States
- Zip Code: 64133
- Zip Code: 64133
- Record
- SN02822836-W 20120803/120801235558-7e5fdb983914e49aabf8d2da48cdf7da (fbodaily.com)
- Source
-
FedBizOpps Link to This Notice
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