Pre_Proposal_Transcript_Final.docx
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- E-Gov Travel Services 2. 0 (ETS2) Federal contract opportunity
- Solicitation number
- SOL__QMAD-JM-100001-N
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- GSA Federal Acquisition Service
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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION
OFFICE OF TRAVEL AND TRANSPORTATION SERVICES
| ETS2-GOV TRAVEL SERVICES 2 (ETS2) |
| PRE-PROPOSAL CONFERENCE |
| TUESDAY, |
| SEPTEMBER 14, 2010 |
The pre-proposal conference convened at 1:00 p.m. in the GSA Auditorium, GSA Headquarters, 1800 F Street N.W., Washington, D.C., Frank Robinson, Program Manager, presiding.
OSA PANEL:
TIM BURKE, Director, FAS Office of Travel and Transportation Services
TED CROUSHORE, Contracting Specialist
JEFFREY M. MEYERS, Contracting Officer, Office of Acquisition Operations
FRANK ROBINSON, Program Manager
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Welcome and Introduction Tim Burke
Overview of the Pre-Solicitation Conference Frank Robinson
Section A Notice Concerning Solicitation Ted Croushore
Section B - Supplies or Services & Prices/Costs Ted Croushore
Section C - Statement of Work Frank Robinson
Section D - Contract Clauses Ted Croushore
Section E - Solicitation Provisions Ted Croushore
Section F - Evaluation Criteria & Method of Award Ted Croushore
Section G - Offeror Representations and Certifications Ted Croushore
Questions and Answers Frank Robinson
Closing Comments
| NEAL R. GROSS | ||
| COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS | ||
| 1323 RHODE ISLAND AVE., N.W. | ||
| (202) 234-4433 | WASHINGTON, D.C. 20005-3701 | www.nealrgross.com |
| P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S | ||
| (1:04 p.m.) | ||
| MR. BURKE: We just have a few more coming in. All right. All set? Thank you. | ||
| Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to General Services Administration's Headquarters in Washington, D.C. For those of you that came in from out of town, I hope your travels were safe and sound. For those of you that had to park here, I am sure they weren't. | ||
| So welcome to the ETS2 pre-proposal conference. Before I go any further, I want to thank all of you in this room and many that are not in this room. We are conducting a webinar for this. There are folks outside of Washington that are on a webinar and that process, as long as they can hear me, which I hope they can, our folks in the booth will be receiving input on questions for the folks on the webinar. Those questions will be then brought in during the break period time which the questions will be answered on the back end of the session today. So we welcome the folks online as well. | ||
| We very much appreciate the support industry has put into this over the last year and a half. It has been a lengthy process in some respects. It has been burdensome to many but it has all been in the spirit of pursuing to this next level. So the appreciation the government has for industry's efforts, we know it is an investment not only of your time and your people but also of your thought and frankly your budgets. It is very, very important that that is recognized and, in doing so, we had gotten some feedback that it was important to give you more time on extending the contract response to the proposal that I believe Frank has then moved to the 27th of October. So we hope that is appropriate. We hope you found that beneficial in order to respond to the RFP. | ||
| I do want to do some introductions. There are a group of program management office folks here and our contracting team. Jeff Meyers is our senior contracting officer. Ted Croushore is the contracting specialist. And Frank Robinson is the program manger. | ||
| In the front rows here, you have many of our subject matter experts and the people who have been working with you diligently over the last 16 to 18 months to get this product to where it is on the street today. | ||
| There have been discussions about the timeline involved on this. And I just want to emphasize that while we have extended to a degree the front end of the development of the solicitation, the requirements development, we have not shortened up the back end of the acquisition process. We are still on schedule and intend to be on schedule through the process of 2011. | ||
| Let me talk a little bit about the agenda today. Frank will hit with you in just a minute but I want to talk to you a little bit about a vision statement. | ||
| This ETS2 vision statement is a little different than what existed in ETS1. For those folks on the webinar that may just be on phone, streamlined, adaptable world-class travel management service that continually applies commercial best practices to realize travel efficiencies and deliver a transparent, accountable, and sustainable service that yields exceptional customer satisfaction. | ||
| That vision statement was driven by feedback from customers. This morning we had our quarterly executive governance Travel Governance Council meeting this morning. All of our customer agencies attended. Some are here this afternoon. | ||
| I can tell you without a doubt they are anxious. They are excited. They are very optimistic about the process that we have in place today. It is always scary to think about a 15 year contract, installing new services. But we are very confident that with the input that industry has provided, the capabilities have advanced themselves pretty dramatically in the last three to five years. | ||
| The government's requirements have changed a little bit but we are going to count on this process to help us focus in on those. Consolidation is critical. Data is absolutely a requirement for us to be able to manage travel in a world-class basis going forward. The government is focusing on taking travel management to the next level and I believe our customer agencies are counting on the ETS2 award to help that leap into the next generation. | ||
| There is extensive research that has been done that has identified capabilities that we believe are reachable, attainable, and will be realized with deployments beginning on 2012 to 2013. | ||
| I don't want to take too much more of the time and I want to turn it over to Frank and his team to address the issues of the statement of work so that we can move into your important feedback but I will close on a couple of statements that I think are important. | ||
| Sustainability is the future of how we are going to manage practically in an environmentally-focused space. It is also tied in to using technology for a mobile world. GSA is extremely committed to leading sustainable product development in the government space. They are very committed to doing it through the travel programs. We are very excited that new enterprises are being born as a result of that. | ||
| We are convinced that the travel technology solutions that are in the space today and the lead travel management practices are represented by the people in this room. We couldn't be more grateful for that. We wish you good luck through the process. I encourage you to be as loud and as assertive and aggressive on your inquiries and your questions today. It is a complex bid that has got a simple objective and that is for our travelers. Each time they travel, it is easy for them to do. They are able to get their mission accomplished and the travel service becomes almost invisible and it is appreciated in the fact that it is not a burden. Technology does not have to be painful. | ||
| So we are looking at it from a comprehensive perspective and we know the travel management can be achieved in the space. So I wish you good luck. I would like to have Frank come up and kick it off. Frank, it is all yours. | ||
| MR. ROBINSON: Thank you, Tim. Let's back up here real quickly. This is our agenda for today. We got started pretty close to 1:00. We are actually a little bit ahead of schedule. We will be going through the solicitation in some detail between myself and Ted Croushore until about 2:30. If we get finished sooner than 2:30, we will take a 30 minute break. If we get finished after 2:30, we will resume at 3:00. Okay? | ||
| And then after the break, we will have questions and answers. And as Tim mentioned, the folks that are listening in on the webinar, if you want to type in your questions, they will be recorded and they will be brought to us for consideration. | ||
| Also let's see, as we are moving through the process, if you could, I mean, the purpose of this session is to provide clarity to the government's objectives, what we are trying to accomplish with this solicitation, and provide transparency into the acquisition process. So we do want to be able your questions. We want to be able to answer your accurately, to the maximum extent possible. And to that point, if we know what paragraph you are referring to, that helps a lot with our accuracy. So if you could reference a paragraph number wherever possible. | ||
| Also, we will have microphones during the Q&A session. We will have microphones going up to the center isle here and the two side isles. If when you ask a question through a microphone, you state your name and the name of your organization so that again, the folks that are participating in the webinar can understand that as well. In addition, we have a court reporter doing a transcription and the transcription is more helpful if the court reporter knows name and affiliation of the person who is speaking. | ||
| The questions to this bidders' conference, as well as questions that we receive from FedBizOpps will be posted to FedBizOpps. And again I want to apologize and add to Tim's comments. We have responded to many of the questions that were sent in as a result of the initial draft solicitation. Unfortunately, those were posted late. So if you could take a look at those and see if your question was already answered. If it wasn't, then resubmit it. Okay? | ||
| We need to receive the next round of questions by September 21st and we are going to do everything possible to have them responded to as early in October as possible. | ||
| Market research is closed. So those folks who are accustomed to calling me or Tim or somebody else on our team to ask a question about what or to provide information around market research, all questions now must go through the contracting officer at ETS2 at GSA.gov. | ||
| And lastly, we will present some time frames around the procurement schedule but those are notional time frames based again number of proposals received and other factors. | ||
| As another point of clarity, while we are going to do everything we can today to answer your questions accurately, anything that is said here does not supersede what is in this final solicitation. So the final solicitation overrules anything that might be said during the presentation. It also overrules any questions or responses to questions. So it is the solicitation and terms and conditions of the final solicitation that are the most significant thing and what you should focus on. And I guess that covers the second bullet, too. | ||
| So we are going to start with just a little bit of background as to what we have been up to, what has led us to this point, more precisely. And we have been engaged for the past 16, actually it feels more like 18, months in extensive market research. We have been very involved in collecting the comments from our customers. We have had individual full-day sessions with multiple customers in the room at the same time. We have had a lot of one-on-one follow-up with customer agencies on their specific requirements. One of the comments we have received is gee there are more safety requirements for ETS1 than there are for ETS2. In fact if we had known everybody's requirements in ETS1, it would have looked remarkably like ETS2. Also some of the requirements come from the fact that we have experience with this now and want to make sure that industry fully understands what the government wants to get out of this round of solicitation. | ||
| With respect to industry, we have had numerous industry days, pre-proposal conferences, one-on-one meetings with industry, questions and answers from industry. So in addition we have done our own market research through subject matter experts and through other avenues. Our objective was to make sure that the requirements we came up with were in fact deliverable to the maximum percent possible and realistically deliverable. | ||
| In addition, we have been talking to a variety of stakeholders. Certainly the governance council, the Executive Governance Council that Tim mentioned a little while ago, we have quarterly meetings with them on a regular basis. Since we have been engaged in the solicitation, we actually had monthly conference calls to follow-up in-between those quarterly meetings. | ||
| So the agencies that are participating and all the agencies are participating, in fact in the room we have Social Security Administration, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Security and Exchange Commission, Department of Commerce, Department of Education. I'm not going to -- They want to remain anonymous. Let me see, is there anybody else I missed? If I missed anybody -- GSA is here of course. | ||
| So we have a lot of customer interest, agency interest in the outcome of this solicitation as well. | ||
| And then of course, we have been meeting with and briefing the other stakeholders to include the various committees in Congress, as well as various organizations within the Office of Management and Budget. | ||
| We fully expect to conduct the acquisition from 2010 and we will get more specific into through the late summer or fall of 2011. The current contracts, as I think everybody who is in the room now knows expire mid-November of 2013. | ||
| We will continue, I think, to leverage on what was successful in ETS1, which was, to the maximum extent possible, use commercial capabilities in a performance-based contract mode. Again with a number of requirements, we are probably a mix of requirements and performance-based contract but very much it is about the outcome. It is about customer satisfaction, usability, navigability, etcetera. | ||
| And for the first time we will touch on this, we will have service-level agreements that have incentives and disincentives. So this is something unique. I think if everybody maxes out on incentives and doesn't have any incentives, it is several million dollars a year, as we have computed it, that could be earned in incentives for optimal performance. | ||
| In ETS1 we, as everyone knows, had three contractors and what we have heard from both the current contractors and from industry that is interested in participating is there is just not enough volume. We are talking about 2.7 million vouchers to sustain economically in a business environment three vendors and still have the continuous improvement and enhancement that the government wants to see over the term of this contract. So we are going to have two or less contract awards. That is the way it is written. That is the way we have been briefing it. That is the way the government is expecting it to be. | ||
| It again makes whoever is the winning firm or firms more economically sustainable over the long-haul. It creates opportunities for new entrants and competition for new entrants and it is a critical factor in containing cost and service improvement. | ||
| We have also under ETS1 had a ten-year contract. Under ETS2, we have a 15-year contract. It is a three-year base period with three four-year options. Again, this was as much at the request of our customers who said look, it took us two to three years to get deployed. We are four years away from the end of the contract. We have only had three to four years of steady state operations. We want this to last. We want to be able to have a longer period between acquisition and deployment. So we also help that will generate keen interest and help contain costs as well, as the vendors, bidders see opportunity there also. | ||
| The primary objectives, I think most of you if you have seen this presentation before have seen. They haven't changed. Improved usability: We are optimistic that this can be achieved. We have seen our current vendors improve the usability and the navigation of their tools to make them more intuitive. | ||
| Optimize online travel planning. We are going to talk more about this in detail. But at the point of sale, provide the customer with the information necessary to make good decisions at the point of sale, also make good decisions around sustainability alternatives to travel. | ||
| And then with respect to vendor performance, I touched on the service level agreements already but we definitely want to make sure we have high-performing vendor or vendors. | ||
| And then the operational environment we are going to talk a little bit more in detail as well but basically, it is one in which the contractor then, the ETS2 contractor is going to provide us with a schedule of when enhancements will occur. Again, those will be year over year provided, not necessarily for the full 15 years from the outset, obviously, but ensure that the software development life cycle is such that when those enhancements are implemented, something else doesn't break to the maximum extent possible. | ||
| We are looking for a commercial solution that delivers continuous improvement, without a high need for retraining or redeployment of the product services. | ||
| Notional workflow in ETS1. ETS1 has been described, Tim actually described it this way first, as a financial system that did travel. So, this was the first time the government had put in the hands in a commercial organization to tool to manage and control travel. Right? So a lot of financial controls around the travel process. | ||
| In ETS2, it is a travel process with financial controls, so that the end-user has a sense that they are using a commercial product from the beginning and then moves into the authorization and voucher. | ||
| The main point, though, while these are linear diagrams, the main point is that ETS2, the user will need to enter the product at several different places. The service at several different places. They may have already booked their reservations and need to update their authorization. They may have completed the trip and need to go into the voucher. So the services should be flexible enough to enable the travelers to enter and exit as appropriate to their need. | ||
| This is the current schedule and we are currently at the pre-proposal conference September 14th. And as Tim already mentioned, we have extended the due date to October 27th. I believe that amendment went out on September 9th. | ||
| We will be doing evaluations of proposals received through the November, December and potentially early January time frame, after which we will have everybody who submits a bid will be able to provide a demonstration, assuming that some major technical deficiencies don't prevent that. But we will have demonstrations in late January or early February, after which there will be a plan to reduce the number of participants prior to going into the IVV stage validation and verification process. And that is when we will really road test vigorously the solutions that are remaining and receive final proposal revisions in May/June time frame and make an award sometime in late July or August. | ||
| So that is the current schedule but notional is on there someplace. I am sure of it. If it is not on there, it is notional on here, too. So this is another version of the same view. And the difference between this version and the other version is it shows along the top the ETS1 period of performance running in parallel to the ETS2 procurement and agency migration process. | ||
| So we are going to step in now into the actual review of the solicitation. I am going to invite Ted up to review the first several sections and then I will follow after that. | ||
| MR. CROUSHORE: Good afternoon. Before we get into the sections of the RFP, I do want to address the exchanges with industry, specifically procurement integrity issues. As Frank mentioned earlier, all correspondence must go through the contracting officer. So please send your inquiries to ETS2 at GSA.gov. | ||
| And offerors and potential offerors shall not be permitted to discuss the ETS2 procurement with anyone inside the government or the program, except the contracting officer. | ||
| Some issues that we want to highlight this afternoon are small business initiatives. There are several areas of interest to promote small business. CLINs-1 or I am sorry, CLINs for embedded small TMCs you will find in Section B.2. | ||
| SLA 3, small business TMC contracting and you can find that in Section D.28. And then socioeconomic plan and subcontracting plan, you can find that in Section F.3.2.5 as nontechnical factor one. And subcontracting plan there is in accordance with FAR 522199. And the sample can be found in Attachment D.2. | ||
| RFP overview. I will be going through Sections A, with respect to the SF 1449; Section B, pricing and CLIN structures; Section C, statement of work; Section D, terms and conditions and SLAs; Section E, submission of offers; Section F, evaluation criteria; and then Section G, representations and certifications. | ||
| Section A, both the 1449 and the cover page of the solicitation must be completed and signed by an individual with signatory authority. | ||
| Section B, definitions for CLINs can be found in Section B.1. The contract type is going to be firm-fixed-price, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity. Contract line items, firm-fixed-price not to exceed price for the base period and each option period. And then some CLINs are mandatory options, i.e. CLIN 0002JAA for the JFTR. | ||
| Now I will turn us back over to Frank to discuss the issues in Section C. | ||
| MR. ROBINSON: Okay, so this is where we get into the juicy parts of this solicitation. | ||
| Mandatory requirements. Mandatory requirements are what mandatory means. These requirements must be met. These requirements were determined to be mandatory around two factors, primarily. They are either commercially available in a mainstream type of way, okay not commercially available from just one vendor but commercially available from multiple vendors, or they are required by a substantial number, a substantial majority of the customers. So these are the requirements that we have normalized across the customer community and these are the customers that they all agree upon are essential to their performance of travel in pursuit of their missions. | ||
| The objective requirements or the objectives I should say, are desired functionality. It may be desired functionality that is, perhaps emerging commercially or it may be desired functionality that has more of an agency-specific application. | ||
| Any objectives that an offeror submits as being part of their proposal become mandatory. That means that you must then provide and meet that objective requirement. And we do reserve the right to test objectives at various stages in the solicitation, either the demonstration but more likely an IVV. Okay? | ||
| The separate but mandatorily priced options are significant agency-specific requirements. And those requirements have been described and presented in more detail in the attachment. The delivery date and the cost of these separately mandatory priced options will be considered in the evaluations process but they will be ordered during the task order process. So for example U.S. Coast Guard travels under the Joint Federal Travel Regulations and their requirements around the Joint Federal Travel Regulations are included as an attachment to the solicitation. | ||
| For Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Transportation Security Agency, TSA, have a need to move a large number of people in a very short period of time or a large number of people initially over a short period of time but then over a long period of time. So there is requirements around surge, travel management are also in the attachment. | ||
| These are the basic sections of the solicitation we are going to cover. We are going to review just selected attributes of these sections ones I think you will find most interesting or perhaps have the most questions about. | ||
| So moving right into that, we are going to go right to the scope of the solicitation and it includes these types of travel. Now everything from TDY travel, local travel, blanket open travel, group travel, authorization travel, non-federally sponsored travel. There is a broad need for these types of travel. Some more so in some agencies than others might have more invitational travel or non-federally sponsored travel than other organizations do but every organization has some of this. Okay? They all do. So those are pretty much generic throughout the federal government. | ||
| Dependant travel, and we have mentioned this and we have pointed this out in the solicitation, State, USAID, Coast Guard, especially for their overseas locations have a need for the dependants of the servicemember to travel without maybe one of the -- maybe with an attendant as opposed with a parent or perhaps even independently of all of them, depending upon the age of the dependant. | ||
| So dependant travel is very specific to those organizations. This is a requirement where if we had known more about this in ETS1, it would have been in ETS1. | ||
| Joint Federal Travel Regulations I have already talked about. Coast Guard, they are uniformed personnel in NOAA, though, the National Oceanographic and Space or Administration. Anyway, I will get that right one of these days, and uniformed personnel and Health and Human Services that do travel under the Joint Federal Regulations and those requirements I said are in the attachment. And Surge Blanket Travel, FEMA, and TSA are the main candidates for that. | ||
| Usability as I opened up with was one of the areas where we definitely wanted to see improvement as we were moving through ETS1, ETS2. Part of it was again the financial system, a financial control system that did travel versus a travel system with financial controls. But this we expect to very much have a positive effect on customer satisfaction and as travelers learn to use the tool and use it effectively, drive down the costs for training, for Help Desks, and actually for the cost of travel as well. They are using especially the online booking capability effectively. | ||
| Web-based, online, commercially-based, nothing but a browser to access ETS2. That is the only software application that a traveler should need to access ETS2 is the browser. There will be some security issues later on, too, but primarily accessing through the browser. | ||
| Expect the vendors to use a variety of resources to stay current, I should say, with the market conditions, commercial best practices and monitor customer satisfaction to make sure that that continues to improve to higher levels. | ||
| It is an end-to-end process that will include not just the traveler but it will include travel arrangers who do perform travel or make travel arrangements on behalf of someone else. And it will have approving officials as well and a variety of approving officials. All those roles and responsibilities have been laid out in the solicitation. | ||
| And then we have a requirement for a usability manager. And I would like to get some feedback. We would like to get some feedback on the usability manager, your views on should this be a full-time position, part-time position. But we definitely see a role for somebody who is accountable for usability in the management team for ETS2. | ||
| Policy compliance, these are the principle compliance regulations that drive the compliance tools in ETS2. We have specifically in the solicitation referenced the sections of this. So for example, the Federal Travel Regulation as a section that covers relocation. That section is not referenced in the solicitation. The Joint Federal Travel Regulation has an attachment and the Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual, we have referenced the specific section that applied to travel in that. | ||
| Going back real quickly, we also do want to ensure that the government's preferred and negotiated transportation programs for air, lodging, and rental car are incorporated into the solicitation, potentially in the future rail as well. | ||
| User roles, again I touched on this. There is an attachment on user roles and the specific permission levels that are assigned to those roles. So for example, a user traveler may be able to access their own profile and perform reservations for themselves. An arranger may be able to access to profiles and perform reservations for multiple people. An approving official may have approval authority over multiple people. Other capabilities as they move into, say Help Desk functionality or administrative functionality would have broader roles. But access, especially access to personally identifiable information is something that we expect to have managed through these user roles so that people have access to information on a need to know basis and not on a nice to have basis. And that is, hence, the unauthorized access. | ||
| Then the integration process, through planning. reservation, authorization and vouchering. And again, do not interpret the sequence on the slide to be necessarily the sequence that market research indicates is easiest for our customers to use. Generally speaking, they are accustom to going out to a website, booking travel without training, by the way, and seeing what they want to see, and then moving into the authorization. But all of these are an integrative process. | ||
| And the last bullet is important. The government does have emergency travel for its missions. There may be a situation, there is today, I am going to guarantee was a situation or will be a situation in which a traveler had to unexpectedly get reservations and travel without having the form filled out electronically and internally. | ||
| And so the user and the approving officials can override the process as necessary for the organization to accomplish its mission. | ||
| Web accessible, I am not going to spend too much time on this. The main points to say is that the government is moving to a 2-Factor authentication. So for example, in many, many agencies, GSA included, you need your badge to access your computer. It slips into a slot. That is going to be the security mechanism going forward. | ||
| Until the entire government has this capability, we still have a need for a PIN and strong password requirement again to prevent unauthorized access to the service. And then the rules and behavior, privacy act notification, for those of you have been in the government or worked with the government, this is not new news but this is all at that entrance level to the services that are being provided on that welcome home page or shortly thereafter. Before the traveler gains access to the system would be the best way to say that. | ||
| Planning and reservation service, the government can come up with some acronyms sometimes. Online Travel Reservation, OTRS. This is basically the point of functionality, the point of sale functionality that from market research we know is prevalent in the space so that a traveler is not unknowingly able to purchase or make a travel purchasing decision that is inconsistent with their company's or in this case, the government's policy or the federal agency's policy. | ||
| So again for example, if the traveler has selected an airfare in a city pair market and it is not a city pair airfare, the point of sale tool alerts them to that effect. If it is not the lowest cost city pair, there is a YCA fare and a Dash CA fare on the market, it alerts somebody who has selected a YCA fare that there is a lower cost fare in the market. | ||
| And then lowest logical airfare, the concept of lowest logical airfare. For many of our customers, just getting the best YCA, contract fare is not the best. They want to get the best lowest logical airfare. And so many are considering using and piloting using commercial airfares that are lower in cost than the negotiated contract fares. | ||
| Telepresence alternatives. I have been told every laptop GSA issues to its associates going forward will have a camera in it. | ||
| So, meetings, virtual meetings will become more common place. Our lodging program very likely is going to be asking for telepresence. Does your hotel offer telepresence capabilities going forward? It might not be an evaluation factor but an information factor for our customers. So prompting the traveler to consider green alternatives to getting on an airplane or a train or a car to go wherever it is they are planning to do business. | ||
| FedRooms properties must be displayed first and then, of course, the rental car program that is managed by the Defense Travel Management Office is the preferred rental car product in service for travelers on official business. | ||
| Agent-assisted reservations, the ATRS portion of the OTRS/ATRS equation is agent-assisted. If somebody picks up the phone and calls your travel services, they would be expected to have the same capability to reinforce the traveler to the correct decision, as is required on the online reservation capability. | ||
| Okay. Ticketing of fulfillment can be provided by either an embedded TMC -- For those new to the nomenclature, embedded TMC is a travel management center that is a part of the ETS2 contractor's offering or an accommodated TMC which would be a travel agency that, as GSA does, we have a contractor for travel agency services independently from the ETS contract. | ||
| So again, we have requirements in the solicitation regardless of the TMC relationship to the technology side of it that there is an integration and collaboration in how those folks work together. | ||
| Quality control that we really anticipated getting in ETS1 that was not delivered as effectively as it could be. The mid-office automated quality control will be provided by the ETS2 vendor and those quality controlled reservations will be distributed then to the embedded TMCs for fulfillment. | ||
| So this ensures consistent application of quality control across all of an ETS2 contractor's embedded TMCs, as opposed to having quality control provided independently by each individual travel agency. | ||
| Travel authorization vouchers, all the reservation and authorization activity will feed into the vouchers which will perform the computation of entitlements is the word the government uses, based on the type of travel the person has had and then be able to distribute the reimbursements, whether it be the individual billed account or the central billed account or to travelers checking, savings account through an interface with the financial systems. | ||
| While supporting an interface and we have ability to support electronic transmissions, agency financial systems well over 97 or 98 percent of the transactions that are being processed by ETS1 today are interfaced to a financial system. There are still some agencies out there that don't do this. They prefer manual data entry and so that is why we have the ability to support it, not necessarily to deliver it. | ||
| The desire to or the requirement to allocate costs across multiple lines of accounting. It is very common for a traveler to go on a TDY trip and be serving several different missions at the same time and a portion of that travel expense needs to be allocated appropriately to those areas that the traveler is serving. And then again, that is all supported in the interface to the financial systems. | ||
| Travel advances. Most travel advances today are done through a traveler charge card, an individual billed account traveler charge card. But the FTR does not require travelers to have a government-issued charge card unless they travel five or more times a year. So there will be instances in which a traveler will get a cash advance in some other form. A check that they pick up at the purser's office. They might get a prepaid debit card with an amount of money on it. Regardless, there will be multiple methods of cash advances that earn on solicitation and the service needs to be able to not only enter that amount, process against it, but then liquidate it at the end of the trip. And if there is residual funds, enable the government to track and collect those residual funds on a cash advance. | ||
| Payment methods. As I mentioned, individual billed accounts, central billed accounts, IBAs, CBAs are the principle methods for payment. | ||
| The government still has some government travel requests out there. There has a been a huge, huge movement to try to eliminate government travel requests. And if you have a question about government travel request, write that down. Like, "What is a government travel request?" Okay, if you are not familiar with it. It is still though used a lot, government travel requests are used a lot for purchasing air travel primarily overseas. The State Department, USAID uses it a lot in countries where they cannot easily exchange funds for dollars or local currencies for dollars. They use it to pay for air travel out of those countries. | ||
| And then some travelers will use their personal cards. As I mentioned before, they are not required to have a government issued charge card unless they travel five or more times a year. They cannot purchase air with their personal card, so they cannot purchase government contract fares with their individual billed accounts but some government employees use their personal cards to pay for rental cars at government rates and lodging at FedRooms rates. | ||
| So allowance for entry of personal card information, charge card information is also important. And then our customers very, very much want to be able to configure configurable settings without putting in a change request to the vendor. | ||
| So for example, if Agency A has local travel expenses or even TDY travel expenses, it might be different than Agency B. Agency A can go in and update those expense tables without having to put in a change request to the vendor. It is a simple example of what that customer configuration bullet means. | ||
| As far as the technical capabilities, the Federal Enterprise Architecture requirements, we have designed this solicitation to ensure that we support all of the government's requirements around both architecture and I will touch on this in a minute, security. But the browser based requirements that the government has now and in the future, a lot of these are, they have a security component to it. So for example, in order to encrypt the transactions, the browser has to have an encryption capability that is specified in the solicitation TLS. We want to be able to have the service scale up to 10,000 concurrent users. And this is especially important if we are only going to have two or potentially one ETS vendor going forward in 2011 and 12. The scalability to meet the government's demand is critical to the success of the program and to the satisfaction of the customers. | ||
| Then data exchange, I think we did a very good job in ETS1 establishing data exchange for the interfaces to agency financial systems but there are other organizations in other areas where that data needs to be exchanged, the travel MIS being one which has proven to be very valuable to the organizations and enables a number of our customers to submit, for example, their first-class travel report consistently across the government. | ||
| And then with respect to the greenhouse gas emissions report, which was required by the President's executive order, over 80 agencies were able to use travel MIS to produce that report. And there was consistent application of the formulation throughout that entire process. So the government, by having data consolidated in one location is looking apples to apples to apples across the space. | ||
| Security is probably one of the bigger challenges that we see for industry in this solicitation. It was in ETS1 as well. Protection of personally identifiable information is paramount to the government. And I think everybody here has seen a press release where someone's laptop was stolen and their personally identifiable information was released or some organization was hacked into and personally identifiable information was taken out of the government's mainframe computers. So again, in trusting commercial entities to maintaining the privacy of this security, these are the same standards that are applied to the government systems. | ||
| In ETS1, I think, they were actually applied better than sometimes apply to government systems. But this is an area that is well, all the mandatory requirements, none of them are open to debate but this will be a critical consideration as we move forward through ETS2. | ||
| The term Controlled Unclassified Information and moderate sensitivity level, that term may change but the basic concept is, this is not top secret information. This is information that must be protected but needs to be accessible and usable in order for the service to function effectively. | ||
| Compliant with HSPD-12 Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 directs background investigations on individuals who have access to personally identifiable information. So, this is very much a requirement for ETS1. A disaster recovery site, I think again in ETS1 this is something that several of the vendors did very well. And the disaster recovery site will be providing more specificity around that as we move forward but we are looking to have, if something happens to the primary site, an alternate site up within 72 hours or less. And that will likely be reflected in an amendment going forward here. | ||
| Data encryption, as I have already mentioned, data needs to be encrypted over the browser that the traveler is connecting to. It needs to be encrypted at rest. It needs to be encrypted in interfaces between financial systems and the ETS vendors data repositories. And at any time the data is either inside or outside the boundary, it needs to be encrypted using standards that comply with the federal government's encryption standards. | ||
| Another significant aspect and I think this is something that the current ETS vendors work very, very hard to do well is 508 compliance. We have a number of federal associates who have visual challenge, most of them. Some of them have other types of challenges but the accessibility to ETS by any user regardless of their physical challenges must be an integral part of ETS 2 as well. | ||
| And so compliance or conforming with these standards very much should be considered and factored into your offer. | ||
| We touched on agency business system integration already. Many of our agencies have legacy business systems whose interfacing capabilities are a challenge. Others have very modern financial and in some cases full ERP systems that take full advantage of all of the web services capabilities and the modern data and exchange capabilities. You are going to have to be able to deal with both. | ||
| The principle attributes around the data is the government owns the data. So we need to have it interfaced with the financial systems, interfaced with our databasing capabilities but it is the government's data. At times, and we will touch on this, there will be reports that the governments wants you to produce on their data. And that is another way to find out -- for agencies to get the information they need to better manage travel, or in some cases manage emergencies. | ||
| We have probably the -- No. Undoubtedly, the biggest attachment to the ETS1 solicitation are the data elements. And I can't remember how many pages that turned out to be but it was a bunch, 300 or 400 I think, maybe more. We just wanted to make sure there was no confusion about what we meant by any particular data element. But these will be used then to map information to and from agency financial systems but also for other processes. Obviously, there is some information that they don't want in the agency financial system. Traveler profile or preferences might be something that they don't want in financial systems. | ||
| But all of the data elements, while they are not specific to any one functionality are necessary for the overall functionality of the service. And then providing the data to the government designated third-party authorities where we ask you to send it, we will send it securely. | ||
| The queries and reports capabilities, this is where the ETS vendor is still delivering some of the reporting capabilities. The process reports would perhaps tell a customer where authorizations are stuck in process or if there is a specific approval official who may not be timely in approving either an authorization or a voucher. So these are designed to support the approval process, make sure that the work flow continues unabated and travelers get on their missions with minimum need to pick up a phone or call somebody. | ||
| Operational information is -- Well, we just had a celebration of the ninth anniversary of 2011. In 2001, agencies, most of them, had no clue where their travelers were and no agencies, most of them had no clue where their travelers were and no easy way to find that out. Today, if there is an earthquake or some other event occurs and an organization needs to find its travelers so it knows how to support those travelers, this is the purpose of the operational, one of the uses of this operational information. | ||
| And then there will be occasions that will occur over the next 15 years where there may be not traveler-level specific or even department-level specific reports that are required but governmentwide summary level reports on I don't know, policy perhaps or some other issue. And those departmental reports that are governmentwide summary-level would also be required. | ||
| Records retention and reporting, NARA requires that records be retained 75 months after the date of payment. This requirement extends beyond ETS2 contract. So trips that occur in 2027, I guess it is, trips that occur in 2027, they may still need to be audited for some reason after the contract has transitioned to ETS3 or ETS next gen or whatever it is going to be called. The contractors need to have those records available and accessible in an auditable format as part of the NARA requirement. | ||
| Standard implementation services, we have a requirement to certainly smoothly transition from the current ETS vendor to the awarded ETS2 contractor. We are already actually working with the migration managers. We have bi-monthly meetings with the migration managers to plan on this. This is going to becoming much more tactical going forward. It is much more strategic at the moment but the individual agencies will have their transition plans. I suspect because we have this group together now which we didn't have in ETS1, there will be much more commonality to those plans going forward. They will have communications plans, getting information out to the travelers as to what is going to happen and when. There will be data. Not so much voucher data from ETS1 but profile data, configurable table data that needs to be -- routing list, things of that nature that need to be transitioned from ETS1 into ETS2. Memorandums of understanding and integration security agreements that govern the exchange of data between ETS1 and the financial systems or ETS2, excuse me, and the financial systems and the implementation service levels are outlined in the solicitation going from the small organization into a very, very large organization. Agencies, in fact, may end up ordering multiples of these at some points, depending upon the size of the organization the complexity of their deployment. | ||
| The good news folks, I've only got about a hundred more slides and then I am going to turn it back to Ted. | ||
| Account management. We were very, very focused in ETS1 on getting the services operational and performing and transactions processing through the -- and getting the services deployed. This is not called E-Gov Travel Service by accident. There is a system that supports the service but service is the end game here folks. So being able to provide effective account management to your customer agencies is something that is going to get a lot of analysis and evaluation this time around. Particularly identifying opportunities for the agencies to improve customer satisfaction. Sometimes it is in the configuration, the customer satisfaction issues are. Okay? Or abilities for the agencies to reduce costs. There is going to be a lot of pressure. I think everybody is reading what is happening in the newspaper. There is going to be a lot of pressure to reduce costs. So managing things when the agency implements the lowest logical airfare, managing those unused tickets to come out of that lowest logical airfare application. | ||
| Now key performances and benchmarking around professional travel management that can support the agency's ability to make the best use of taxpayer dollars in the management of their travel. | ||
| Another key point here, the last small bullet, implement simplified billing procedures. Folks said, well this is understandable. It was the first time we had all these CLINs for ETS1 for reservations and authorizations and vouchers. And one of the things that travelers and also other organizations have said, you know, don't show me so many transaction fees. Simplify the billings so that you are fairly reimbursed but so my traveler is not having to reconcile three, four, five fees in order to submit a voucher. Okay? | ||
| Some of our customer agencies have come up to us and said you know, I spend more time chasing around 1350s and 1450s and 1750s and not enough time focused on managing travel. So this simplified billing procedures is very much on the forefront of what our folks would like to get out of ETS2. | ||
| Online help. Customers are used to mouse-overs or clicking on a page and getting context-sensitive help to whatever question or problem they might have. Contacting the Help Desk, Tier 1 in particular via multiple methodologies is important. I mean, there is a whole generation of people out there that don't pick up the phone and call anymore. They text somebody or they IM somebody, rather than phoning, emailing or faxing. We have Tier 1 Help Desk. Some of our agency customers like very much providing their own Tier 1 support to their travelers. They know whether it is a network issue or a training issue or if there is something around the traveler's browser that is not working right but they want to provide that Tier 1 support. |
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