SoleSourceRequest.pdf

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State Purchasing and Contracts Office

DPA_OSCRequests@state.co.us

Sole Source Request §24-103-205, C.R.S.

Use this form for sole source approvals. A sole source procurement is justified when there is only one good or service that can reasonably meet the need and there is only one vendor who can provide the good or service. A requirement for a particular proprietary item (i.e., a brand name specification) does not justify a sole source procurement if there is more than one potential bidder or offeror for that item.

Note: If this sole source is for services greater than $100,000, posting on an electronic procurement system may be required in accordance with §24-106-103(5) C.R.S.

Instructions:

1. Save the document using “save as” to keep your answers.

2. Complete all fields below. Failure to provide all information may delay the processing of your request.

3. Include any documentation to support your request as attachments with the form.

4. If your request involves multiple transactions, submit a separate form for each request.

5. Submit the complete form, with attachments, to

DPA_OSCRequests@state.co.us (copy and paste in your email).

SECTION A – Agency/IHE Information

1. Agency/IHE Name:

2. Division/Office:

3. Program Manager:

4. Department Approving Official:

5. Procurement Official:

SECTION B - Vendor Information

1. Vendor Name:

2. Vendor Contact Information (Contact Name, Email, and Phone):

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3. Have you procured goods and/or services from this vendor in the past 2 years?

If yes, please explain:

SECTION C - Description of Goods/Services

1. Describe in detail the goods and/or services to be procured and how they meet your needs. Explain WHY we MUST buy this particular good and/or service (special features, compatibility, etc.):

2. Are there other goods or services that can meet the state’s needs?

If yes, please explain:

SECTION D - Approval Period and Estimated Dollar Amount

1. Is this purchase a one-time purchase?

If no, identify approval period being requested:

Start Date (M/D/YYYY):

End Date (M/D/YYYY):

2. Estimated Total Dollars for this procurement:

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3. Provide estimated cost breakdown of goods and/or services covered by this procurement:

Goods:

Services:

SECTION E - Price Reasonableness

1. Were the prices or rates compared to established catalog or market prices?

2. Were the prices or rates compared to historical prices or rates for similar goods or services procured by in the past?

3. Was a cost or price analysis conducted?

4. If you answered “no” to 1-3 above, describe how the agency determined the prices were fair and reasonable, as required by §24-103-403 C.R.S. and §24-30- 202 C.R.S. for this sole source:

SECTION F - Conflict of Interest

1. Do you have an actual or potential conflict of interest in this purchase request?

If yes, please explain:

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SECTION G - Sole Source Justification

1. Provide a detailed explanation of vendor’s Sole Source Status. What is the basis for identifying this as a sole source?

2. Was this sole source posted on an electronic procurement system?

If “Yes”, were any responses received?

3. Is there any additional information that the SPCO would need to consider for this request?

Untitled

Email: jjohnson@linq.com Phone number: 737-742-5467

The Healthy School Meals for All Program statute provides that, “Any participating Sponsors that create a parent and student committee to advise on food purchasing (advisory committee) is eligible to receive a local food purchasing grant to purchase Colorado grown, raised, or processed products for school meals.” The Local Food Program (LFP) grant offers eligible Child Nutrition Sponsors funding for the purchase of Colorado grown, raised, or processed products. A Child Nutrition School Food Authorities (also known as Sponsors) refers to public school districts, charter school food authorities, day treatment facilities, and Residential Child Care Institutions that participate in federal nutrition programs like the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs.

CDE’s nutrition team is currently operating the statewide Local Food Program through a Google Sheet process that sees 30+ individual sheets tracked and combined to provide data that can be used to support the legislative requirements, including mandated reporting, within Colorado’s Healthy School Meals for All Act. Continuing to use a Google sheet will become unwieldy as more Sponsors participate in this Program.

Therefore, CDE needs LINQ to update its existing system to track the local food purchasing grants to Sponsors. The legislation requires reporting on Sponsor local purchases including vendor, market channel, items purchased, product category, how the item qualifies for the grant and the price. In December every two years, the Department must prepare a report that includes implementation of CRS §22-89.9-205 and that addresses the effect of the use of local food purchasing grants on the quantity of Colorado grown, raised, or processed products purchased by participating Sponsors, the cost of these purchases, and a compilation of the information reported by participating Sponsors pursuant to section 22-82.9-205 (1).

See Section G, question 1 for more information on why CDE’s needs mean purchasing the Local Food Purchasing Grant tracking system from LINQ.

OTHER ENHANCEMENTS

In addition to the local food program tracking module mentioned above, CDE also needs LINQ to make several modifications to its existing system including:

CDE needs LINQ, to make updates to the SFSP Site Application so that two fields already captured on the application — “Designation” (under Street Address) and “Geographic Location” (Urban/Rural determination, in the Internal Use Only section) — populate into the SFSP Site Application Export, which does not currently include them.

CDE needs LINQ to updates to how the system calculates Severe Need Breakfast (SNB) eligibility and the 2-cent differential reimbursement, so both calculations reflect CDE's current eligibility rules — including CEP-specific logic — and so the 2-cent differential is calculated at the Sponsor level independently of the Severe Need calculation.

CDE needs LINQ to replace two existing binary Internal Use Only (IUO) override controls — one for Severe Need Breakfast (SNB) eligibility, one for the 2-cent differential — with three-state Default / Yes / Off toggles, each defaulting to the system-calculated determination, so CDE staff can explicitly control reimbursement independent of the system's calculation, including the ability to explicitly block reimbursement at sites or sponsors the system has determined eligible.

CDE needs LINQ to add a new column labeled “Claim ISP” to all LINQ’S existing CEP Schedule Report export formats, including but not limited to CSV, Excel, and PDF and ensure any user with existing permission to export CEP schedules can view the new Group ISP column, without introducing a new permission tier. CDE needs this modification so that we can quickly identify through a site's individual ISP rather than the groupings ISP, whether or not they qualify for certain additional federal program funding opportunities.

CDE needs LINQ to modify its existing system to create and assign a single unique site code to each site for the site's lifetime, independent of program year or sponsor. LINQ will ensure that historical claims, compliance records, and other data linked to a site remain viewable without data loss or ID reassignment when the site changes to a new sponsor and perform additional work related to this update. These modifications will improve how site records and sponsor transfers work at the data-structure level inside LINQ’s existing system. CDE needs this modification so that when a site is transferred to a new School Food Authority or Sponsor, there is continuity and historical transfer of that site’s claims, applications, etc.

For all work, LINQ will be paid $150 an hour for this enhancement work which was solicited via a fair, open, and transparent solicitation process via RFP 2019000046. The quote was obtained pursuant to the process listed in Exhibit A, Section 15 of the Contract for ad hoc work. LINQ developed enhancement deliverable maximums based on the estimated number of hours for each deliverable, and will be paid $150 an hour up to those maximums.

LINQ is the sole owner and developer of LINQ Data Analytics (LDA), the proprietary Child Nutrition Portal that CDE uses for CACFP, SNP, SFSP, and CEP claims and reporting, under the existing Contract which expires September 20, 2029. The Child Nutrition Portal supports program applications (National School Lunch Program, Summer Meals Program, et. al.), claims, Administrative Reviews, training and Direct Certification. This system is already used by Sponsors to enter in data on other nutrition grants. For example, the statewide Child Nutrition Portal provides the capability for Sponsors to enter Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Grant application data, including all minimum USDA requirements and the ability for the State to identify FFVP grant amounts per school. CDE's existing Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program (FFVP) functionality operates within LINQ’s proprietary School Nutrition Program (SNP) Core Module. LINQ will replicate the FFVP claims, allocation, and dashboard workflows to aid in the administration of the Local Food Program (LFP), including grant allocation management, item and category tracking, and creation of a new data cube for ad hoc reporting. In addition, this work fits within the scope of LINQ’s current contract and uses ad hoc rates for pricing that were solicited pursuant to RFP # 2019000046, for enhancement work to the Child Nutrition Portal.

Because LINQ holds the current contract with the State, only LINQ can meet CDE’s current needs which include having one State nutrition system that handles all nutrition grant tracking. LINQ’s contract is through September 30, 2029, which will provide Sponsors with over two years of having the Local Food Program grant data tracking portion of the system and meet our statutory requirements. CDE is working on a request for information which will likely be released this year to gather data for the next iteration of the statewide Child Nutrition Portal solicitation. Because CDE needs one nutrition tracking system for all nutrition grants, CDE when issuing an RFP in the upcoming years for the larger nutrition system will include the Local Food Program tracking into that larger RFP. CDE will be amending LINQ’s current contract to add this additional Local Food Purchasing tracking.

Having the LFP tracking in LINQ’s current Child Nutrition Portal will reduce the burden on 400 Users across roughly 200 Sponsors from having to learn a new platform for use over a short period of time, will reduce the workload for Sponsors who would otherwise need to use multiple different systems for essentially similar tasks, and has the benefit that all nutrition grant data is in one system allowing for better data analytics. By building these features with CDE’s current technology vendor, CDE is mitigating the risk of introducing an additional technology infrastructure for both our internal staff and Sponsors to navigate. Because the proposed LFP module replicates the FFVP claims, allocation, and dashboard workflows already familiar to CDE State Reviewers, State Administrators, and Sponsors, this approach also materially reduces training burden on both sides: internal CDE staff will operate LFP through the same navigation, review queues, and approval actions they already use for FFVP, and external Sponsors will submit and track LFP claims through a bulk-upload and line-item entry process functionally identical to their existing FFVP submission workflow.

In addition,contracting with a new vendor for a net-new system module when LINQ’s current contract is valid for another three years would introduce unnecessary development risk and require duplicating infrastructure already in use via LINQ. Replicating and purposefully modifying LINQ’s existing FFVP functional framework meets CDE’s needs of risk mitigation. This approach leverages proven workflows, reduces regression risk to the core system, and maintains the configurability required by LFP-specific business rules. A competitively bid, architecturally distinct alternative system at this time would instead require CDE, for just a three year period as the entire Child Nutrition Platform will be re-solicited, to retrain its entire Reviewer and Administrator staff on an unfamiliar interface and data model, and would require every participating Sponsor; the majority of whom already interact with the FFVP system; to learn a second, dissimilar submission process, compounding both onboarding cost and the risk of Sponsor submission errors during the LFP rollout period. Engaging an alternate vendor would therefore force CDE to choose between (a) funding a separate technology infrastructure, with increased burden of training and implementation both to internal staff as well as external partners especially when the larger Child Nutrition portal will be re-solicited in the upcoming years or (b) attempting third-party integration against LINQ's proprietary APIs, either of which introduces material regression risk to the FFVP module currently serving Colorado's federally funded meal programs.

OTHER ENHANCEMENTS:

In addition to the local food program tracking module mentioned above, CDE also needs LINQ to make several modifications to its existing system. CDE needs LINQ, CDE needs LINQ to modify existing Urban and Rural reports to include Geographic location and Designation fields to assist in reducing manual tracking of sites that fall outside of normal parameters. CDE needs LINQ to modify existing back end logic related to SNB and 2 Cent Differential calculations per updated USDA FNS rules. CDE needs LINQ to add additional functionality around SNB/2 Cent Differential in the Internal Use Only section allowing staff to adjust when sites are transferred and lose eligibility data from prior years. CDE needs LINQ to add a new column labeled “Claim ISP” to all LINQ’S existing CEP Schedule Report export formats, including but not limited to CSV, Excel, and PDF and ensure any user with existing permission to export CEP schedules can view the new Group ISP column, without introducing a new permission tier. CDE needs LINQ to modify its existing system to create and assign a single unique site code to each site for the site's lifetime, independent of program year or sponsor. LINQ will ensure that historical claims, compliance records, and other data linked to a site remain viewable without data loss or ID reassignment when the site changes to a new sponsor and perform additional work related to this update

LINQ is the sole owner and developer of LINQ Data Analytics (LDA), the proprietary platform CDE uses for CACFP, SNP, SFSP, and CEP claims and reporting, under the existing Contract (CMS 128677 / CORE CT 2020-0035). Because all the modifications listed above are to the proprietary LINQ Data Analytics system, only LINQ can provide these modifications.

Moreover, even if the modifications were not in a proprietary system, only LINQ has the source code and system knowledge to make the modifications in the LDA. Plus, the work involves historical claims data directly, so keeping it with the existing vendor avoids any risk of data loss or reporting errors on a federally funded program.