Analytics Supt 52.212-2 Addenda.docx

ADDENDUM TO 52.212-2, EVALUATION – COMMERCIAL ITEMS

BASIS FOR AWARD

(a) Basis for Contract Award. This is a competitive best value service acquisition conducted in accordance with Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Part 12 in which the Government intends to award one firm-fixed contract. Award will be made to the responsible contractor whose offer conforming to the solicitation, is determined to be the most advantageous to the Government, technical, past performance, and price considered. The solicitation requirements include all stated terms, conditions, representations, certifications, and all other information required by this solicitation. Unless specifically identified in the proposal, by submission of its offer, the Offeror accedes to all solicitation requirements, including terms and conditions, representations and certifications and technical requirements, in addition to those identified as evaluation factors or sub factors. Failure to meet a requirement may result in a proposal being determined ineligible for award. It is the Government’s intent to evaluate proposals and award a contract IAW FAR Part 12.6.

FAR Part 15 based evaluations will NOT be used for this acquisition. The initial proposal should contain the offeror’s best terms; however; the Government reserves the right to conduct exchanges if determined necessary by the Contracting Officer to resolve issues such as technical or price, or deal with contract documentation including any other matter in the evaluation process. The contracting officer reserves the right to award a contract without the opportunity to revise proposals.

The following factors, in descending order of importance, shall be used to evaluate offers:

1. Technical

2. Past Performance

3. Price

Technical and Past Performance are significantly more important than Price.

(1) All technically acceptable offers shall be treated equally except for their prices and performance records. Initially, the government technical evaluation team shall evaluate the technical proposals on a pass/fail basis, assigning ratings of Acceptable, or Unacceptable as described in Table A.1 below. A rating of unacceptable in one or more technical subfactor will render that technical factor as Unacceptable in the Technical Evaluation and the proposal may be ineligible for award.

(2) The following documents will be evaluated for completeness and compliance with the requirements of the RFP. Please refer to the instructions in 52.212-1 Addendum. Incomplete items may be a basis for rejection. Offerors must clearly identify any exception to the solicitation terms and conditions and provide complete accompanying rationale. The evaluation process shall proceed as follows:

If an offeror’s technical proposal is determined to be Technically Unacceptable, no further evaluation will be conducted. Offerors determined to be technically unacceptable may be eliminated from consideration for contract award.

Table 1. Technically Acceptable/Unacceptable Ratings

Table 1. Technical Acceptability Ratings, Defined

The technical volume shall not exceed 40 pages. The page limit does not include the title page, table of contents, any list of acronyms or definitions, submitted resumes, nor the analytics demonstration when in the form of a presentation file submitted under subfactor 1. A page is defined as one face of a sheet of paper containing information. Pages shall be numbered consecutively. Offerors are cautioned that any pages that exceed the page limitations shall not be read but shall be removed and either retained in the contract file without being considered in the evaluation, or, sent back to the offeror.

The proposals will be evaluated against the following subfactor(s):

Subfactor 1: Analytics/Assessment Support: This subfactor is met when the offeror successfully demonstrates its capabilities to analyze, visualize and report results as described in PWS paragraph 6.1. Analytics/Assessments and subparagraphs, meeting the minimum requirements below.

· The offeror’s Analytics Demonstration submission must Demonstrate the capability to effectively analyze, visualize, and report language score progression of foreign language students using a student cohort’s language proficiency scores and online courses / immersions taken over a 10-year period. Assume the program goal is attainment and sustainment of proficiency level 3 or higher. The government will provide the data for analysis.

Produce a report that is relevant, clear, complete, and concise with a minimum of 5 but no more than 10 visuals that effectively illustrates, through text and graphs, an appropriate analysis of proficiency level 3 attainment and sustainment or lack of attainment. The report should address the assumptions, conclusions, unanswered questions, and recommendations for the Client based on the analysis. It should also include detailed methodology documentation effectively communicating the approach, techniques, and statistical analytics tools utilized to complete the analysis. The project will be evaluated for the following attributes:

1. Relevance of the analysis (e.g. appropriate logical relationships between parameters).

1. Clarity of the presented results (e.g. legibility, logical order, consistency, and intuitiveness).

1. Completeness (e.g. assumptions, conclusions, unanswered questions, recommendations, and methods)

1. Conciseness (e.g. number of visuals, use of text and graphs)

The offeror has the discretion to provide the deliverable from something as basic as a PowerPoint presentation up to the use of something as sophisticated as a business intelligence platform (e.g. Power BI, Tableau, etc.), so long as practical, reliable, easy access to the deliverable can be provided without time restriction to the government for the evaluation. If provided in a self-contained format such as a presentation file, it should be in a commonly readable format (e.g. PPTX, DOCX, PDF, etc.) and included with the submission package. If a platform is used, the relevant instructions, links, and account/login information should be provided.

Subfactor 2: Personnel and Capabilities Management Plan: This subfactor is met when the offeror’s Management Plan clearly describe its approach/process to ensure functional continuity and capability to address all requirements described in the PWS. At a minimum, the Management Plan shall include the following:

· Key Personnel – Resume will be evaluated to ensure offeror provides qualified individual who could reasonably fill position designated as key personnel (PWS paragraphs 10.3. and 10.5.). Provide resume for viable candidate who could credibly be expected to participate under this contract. Resume should be annotated to indicate if the Government can expect them to fill the position or are merely representative of the personnel the vendor believes it can provide.

· Adequately address approach and process to prevent gaps in functional activities that could result from personnel issues, such as retirements, resignations, illness, etc. to meet the minimum requirements at PWS paragraph 10.5.

· Must demonstrate experience and ability to provide analytical and assessment support to address requirements per PWS paragraph 6.1. Analytics/Assessments and subparagraphs. The plan must include a discussion of how it will provide personnel with relevant expertise to support conducting on-going psychometric (e.g., reliability and validity analyses), longitudinal, multivariate, and nonparametric analyses using sophisticated statistical, measurement and programmatic assessment techniques and manage large databases in Excel/SPSS. These activities involve statistics, measurement, transformation, and visualization techniques with applied or experimental data such as by conducting laboratory or field research and/or working on applied projects focused on collecting, analyzing, comparing, data modeling, and reporting results.

PAST PERFORMANCE FACTOR.

Using questionnaires, the contracting officer shall seek relevant performance information on offerors based on the past and present efforts provided by the offeror. The Government reserves the right to use both the information provided in the offeror’s Past Performance submittals and information obtained from other sources available to the Government, to include, but not limited to, the Past Performance Information Retrieval System (PPIRS), Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System (FAPIIS), Electronic Subcontract Reporting System (eSRS), Contract Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS), or other databases; interviews with Program Managers, Contracting Officers, and commercial sources and/or non-Government sources, such as any commercial business or customers referenced by the offeror in any of the past performance information disclosed.

Past performance will be evaluated for recency, relevancy, and quality based on customer feedback from the completed Past Performance Questionnaires (however see paragraph above) to establish a single performance confidence assessment rating as follows:

Table 2. Performance Confidence Assessment Ratings

Recent past performance is defined as complete and/or ongoing Government and/or Industry projects performed within three (3) years of the RFP release date.

Relevant past performance is defined as projects that demonstrate a record of providing services similar to those required by the PWS.

Table 3. Past Performance Relevancy Ratings

In evaluating past performance, greater consideration may be given to information on those contracts deemed most relevant to the effort described in this solicitation. The purpose of the past performance evaluation is to allow the government to assess the offeror’s ability to perform the effort described in this solicitation, based on the offeror’s demonstrated present and past performance.

The assessment process will result in an overall performance confidence assessment as described in Table 2. above. Offerors with no relevant past or present performance history or with a performance record so limited that no confidence assessment rating can be reasonably assigned shall receive the rating "Neutral Confidence," meaning the rating is treated neither favorably nor unfavorably.

If the Government receives more than three (3) Past Performance Questionnaires from one offeror, the Government will evaluate the three (3) Past Performance Questionnaires pertaining to the offeror’s three (3) most recent projects. If an offeror does not request past performance feedback from its customers on the basis that it does not possess a recent/relevant past performance record, then the offeror shall affirmatively state so in its proposal.

PRICE EVALUATION FACTOR:

The government will rank all technically acceptable offers by total evaluated price (TEP). The Offeror’s TEP will be determined by multiplying the quantities identified in the Price Schedule of the RFP by the offeror’s firm-fixed price for Contract Line Item Number (CLIN) X001 for the base year, and all option periods, to confirm the extended total amount for CLIN X001. The extended total amounts for CLIN X001 for the base year, and each option period, will then be added together to calculate the TEP. The price evaluation will document the reasonableness of the proposed TEP. FAR 52.217-8, Option to Extend Services, is included in the solicitation and will be incorporated into the resultant contract. This extension will be evaluated as part of the initial contract award; therefore upon exercise, the clause will extend the terms and conditions of the contract period being extended at the rates specified in the contract. Evaluation of options shall not obligate the Government to exercise the options.

PRICE REASONABLENESS: The prices submitted in each offeror’s price proposal, as required by Addendum to FAR 52.212-1 will be evaluated to determine if proposed prices are fair and reasonable IAW FAR Part 13.106-3(a) (which may include, but not limited to, one or more of the following proposal analysis techniques listed below). A contract will not be awarded to an offeror whose price is not determined to be fair and reasonable.

Competitive offers, market research, current price lists, catalogs, or advertisements, comparison with similar items in a related industry, comparison to the independent Government estimate, or any other reasonable basis.

The Contracting Officer has determined that this requirement meets the commercial item definition in FAR 2.101; therefore, certified cost or pricing data is not required per FAR 15.403-1(b)(3).

If the lowest priced evaluated technically acceptable offer has a Substantial Confidence performance confidence assessment, that offer represents the best value for the government and the evaluation process stops at this point. Award shall be made to that offeror without further consideration of any other offers.

If the lowest priced offer does not have a Substantial Confidence performance confidence assessment, the next technically acceptable, lowest priced offer will be evaluated and the process will continue (in order by price) until a technically acceptable offer is judged to have a Substantial Confidence performance confidence assessment or until all technically acceptable offers are evaluated. The Contracting Officer shall then make a comparative assessment best value award decision which will include all technically acceptable offers with TEPs lower than the offer with Substantial Confidence as well as the offer with Substantial Confidence. For example, five offers were rated technically acceptable. The first and second lowest TEP offers have less than Substantial Confidence, but the offer with the third lowest TEP has Substantial Confidence. The Contracting Officer will then make a comparative assessment of those three lowest priced offers.

The Government intends to award a contract without discussions with respective offerors. Offerors shall submit sufficient information and in the format specified in 52.212-1 Addendum. Offerors may be asked to clarify certain aspects of their proposal (e.g., the relevance of past performance information) or respond to adverse past performance information to which the offeror has not previously had an opportunity to respond. Adverse past performance is defined as past performance information that supports a less than satisfactory rating on any evaluation element or any unfavorable comments received from sources without a formal rating system. Exchanges conducted with regard to adverse past performance or to resolve minor or clerical errors will not constitute discussions, and the contracting officer reserves the right to award a contract without the opportunity for proposal revision. Therefore, each initial offer should contain the offeror’s best terms from a price and technical standpoint.

The government reserves the right to conduct clarifications or discussions, if determined necessary by the Contracting Officer, to resolve issues such as technical or price, or deal with contract documentation including any other matter in the evaluation process.

Prior to an award, an offeror may be requested to provide business information for the purposes of a responsibility determination in accordance with FAR Part 9. Failure to provide requested information may result in a determination of non-responsibility, and the offeror would then be considered ineligible for award.

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