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FBO DAILY - FEDBIZOPPS ISSUE OF JULY 26, 2017 FBO #5724
DOCUMENT

D -- DHS sole source - Attachment

Notice Date

7/24/2017
 

Notice Type

Attachment
 

NAICS

541512 — Computer Systems Design Services
 

Contracting Office

Department of Veterans Affairs;Technology Acquisition Center;23 Christopher Way;Eatontown NJ 07724
 

ZIP Code

07724
 

Solicitation Number

T4NG0227
 

Archive Date

9/19/2017
 

Point of Contact

George Govich, george.govich@va.gov
 

E-Mail Address

george.govich@va.gov
(george.govich@va.gov)
 

Small Business Set-Aside

N/A
 

Award Number

VA118-16-D-1016
 

Award Date

7/21/2017
 

Description

ACE Application Development Support Control Number: TAC-17-43956 2 Control Number: TAC-17-43956 JUSTIFICATION FOR AN EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY 1. Contracting Activity: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Acquisition Operations Technology Acquisition Center 23 Christopher Way Eatontown, NJ 07724 2. Description of Action: The proposed sole source task order against Transformation Twenty-One Total Technology Next Generation (T4NG) Contract Number VA118-16-D-1016 is to provide Information Technology (IT) services by utilizing Agile software development methodologies for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Office of Information and Technology (OIT), Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) operating system. 3. Description of the Supplies or Services: The CBP OIT s mission is to deliver high-quality information technologies, such as ACE, and services to CBP, other Government agencies, and the international trade community in support of the agency s day-to-day activities to secure the border and facilitate trade. OIT manages CBP s technology infrastructure and information and technology operations in order to enable CBP mission readiness and improve the ability of the agency to be proactive and responsive to new threats. Specifically, the Government requires IT services for the ACE program to include analysis, design, development, deployment, and Operations and Maintenance (O&M) services on the remaining products used for the ACE program.    These products include Air Manifest, Entry Summary; Statements; Quota; Drawback; Doc File Location; Recon; Liquidations; Data Migration; Collections; Debt Management; ECS/Cash Register; Intragovernmental Payment and Collection System; Debit Voucher Script;  Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act, Express Consignment Carriers, Debt Collection Information Update Scripts; ACE work for Automated Commercial System Mainframe Decommissioning; Automated Broker Interface Router; Truck External Message Handler; Court of International Trade Products; Drawback  Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act (TFTEA); and Truck Refactor.   ACE is not a single operating system but a collection of products built on diverse multi-vendor technological platforms. All these products work in sync to provide an integrated platform for all cargo functionality. Thus ACE is the backbone of CBP s/OIT s trade processing and risk management activities and key to implementing many of the agency s trade transformation initiatives involving international trade covering truck, ocean, air and rail carriers, importers, exporters, and customs house brokers. ACE is essential to the ability of CBP and other Federal agencies to execute their missions. Consequently, it is critical that ACE has the continuing technical resources and infrastructure in order to address new system functionality fixes and maintenance issues that will arise. This task order is required in order to complete the analysis, design, development, deployment, and O&M support of ACE functionality. The current task order VA118-1010-0023 issued under the prior T4 contract VA118-11-D-1010 supporting the CBP ACE program ends on July 8, 2017. The period of performance shall be a five-month base period with one three-month option period and one four-month option period. The estimated value of this proposed action is REDACTED, inclusive of options. 4. Statutory Authority: The statutory authority permitting an exception to fair opportunity is Section 41 U.S.C. 4106(c)(2) as implemented by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Subpart 16.505(b)(2)(i)(B), entitled Only one awardee is capable of providing the supplies or services required at the level of quality required because the supplies or services ordered are unique or highly specialized. 5. Rationale Supporting Use of Authority Cited Above: The proposed source for this action is SRA International Inc., (herein referred to as SRA), 4300 Fair Lakes Court, Fairfax, Virginia 22033. SRA was awarded the current task order (VA118-1010-0023) in December 2013 on a competitive basis under the T4 contract vehicle. Only SRA can provide the aforementioned IT services which include analysis, design, development, deployment, and support services on the remaining products used for the ACE program seamlessly without any disruptions to the remaining software development and scheduled deployments that could negatively impact international trade and national security operations if there are schedule delays. SRA is in the process of developing a number of different products and functions (currently total of 21) under the ACE program.   Several have completed development and passed User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and are in the process of being fielded, but many products, including products based on late emerging critical requirements, are still in the analysis, design, and development stages.   Through the planning and development stage that is ongoing and recently occurred in February 2017, the Government s technical experts discovered during this time frame that the remaining products being developed required further analysis, design, and development to meet these late emerging critical requirements including those for Revenue Collections functionality. In the current development environment SRA is the primary contractor since January, 2014 and the only source that is able to complete and execute these tasks for products described herein without duplication of substantial efforts to meet Government requirements. For example, any other source would have to re-work and re-perform different aspects of the software code used to develop the 21 products assigned to SRA in order to complete the analysis, design, development, and testing. This would also result in extensive delivery delays of at least 12 months and duplicated cost of over $3,000,000.00. These estimates are based on previous efforts that were conducted to develop existing applications. Any other source would also face the usual hurdles of obtaining security and other clearances and access to systems which would increase the delays to congressionally mandated deadlines such as TFTEA deployment (February, 2018) as well as other deployment dates that are released under Federal Register Notices and internal CBP deployment milestones associated with the decommissioning of the mainframe and associated legacy cargo clearance systems. There is also a high risk of technical failure if any other source was to engage in duplicating the efforts SRA has already done. Specifically, the products that the Government requires analysis, design, development, deployment, and O&M support services on are highly complex. ACE is a highly complex system that interconnects with other Government systems and commercial entities. From a technology standpoint, examples of the system s complexity that SRA fully understands and can support are:   80% of ACE functionality is transmitted to end users via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) which ACE supports under multiple EDI formats such as UNEDIFACT, ANSI X12 and two CBP custom formats called CATAIR and CAMIR. These formats have complex syntax and validation rules that are specific to each format. CBP receives over 100 different message types in one or a combination of the supported formats. Each trade submission has its own business process, workflow, and in most cases is built as an ACE sub-system. SRA knows the EDI specifics in ACE and how the formats interact. ACE data is spread across different databases; DB2, Oracle and Datacom. SRA understands which database is the system of record in each ACE application and how data is replicated across the three sets of databases. The international trade cargo business process lifecycle can span over three years. SRA knows all the events that can happen in this cargo lifecycle and how ACE handles each event. SRA has played a primary and significant role in developing and deploying ACE software and has led the effort over other contractor support in providing core ACE functionality during the past three years. However, Government changes in requirements and the inability of ACE users outside of CBP to complete their own system upgrades that would allow them to interface with ACE have caused delays in meeting software deployments. International Trade and Partner Government Agencies (PGA) could not make the software transitions scheduled in 2016 and early calendar year 2017 due to their inability to upgrade their computer systems to meet the changes that the new ACE functionality required. Since all the cargo entering the U.S. must be filed in order to clear customs, failure to properly transition to the ACE system by all parties would result in a severe disruption to trade and commerce. It is therefore critical to complete the functionality and only SRA can do this in the time necessary to avoid such disruption. Bearing this in mind, the delays in the final deployments were deemed necessary to allow additional time for International Trade to fully transition to ACE filing capability, for the CBP OIT s Cargo Systems Program Directorate (CSPD) to complete ACE software development, for PGA to update their systems to match new ACE functionality, and for Government regulations affected by the original deployment date to be revised where necessary. From an overall ACE development and deployment function, if the Government was to change contractors at this juncture it would have a significant impact on completing new ACE functionality. CSPD has three major software releases planned through February 2018 Release 1 (Post Release & Collections 1) in July 2017, Release 2 (all development for mainframe s retirement of legacy Automated Commercial System [ACS]) in September 2017, and Release 3 (TFTEA) release to meet Congressional mandate) in February 2018. SRA is the key contractor for all of these three releases and, if they weren t awarded the contract action described herein the February 2018 TFTEA release date will not be met as SRA has been working on additional ACE functionality since Congress mandated it in the TFTEA of 2015. In addition, other contractors supporting ACE are behind schedule, jeopardizing the July and September release dates. As a result, SRA is being utilized to close the gap to ensure CSPD is able make the planned release dates.   SRA also has developed critical functionality for the three releases and must be retained to be able to make vital corrections to problems found by customers after the deployments. Finally, any transition of requirements described herein to another vendor includes, but is not limited to, inventory and orderly transfer of all Government Furnished Property (GFP), to include hardware, software, and licenses, Contractor Acquired Government Property, and Government Furnished Information (GFI); transfer of documentation currently in process; transfer of all software code in process; exchange of accounts to access software and hosted infrastructure components; participation in knowledge transfer activities in accordance with the transition plan; provide members to and participate in transition management; identify transition risks and risk mitigation plans. If the Government loses SRA at this juncture and is forced to award another contract to a new vendor, the Government will incur significant deployment delays and costs as outlined above which will impact not only CBP but other Government Agencies as well as the international trade community. 6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: Details of the market research is outlined in section 8 of this document. In accordance with FAR 5.301 and 16.505(b)(2), this action will be synopsized at award on the Federal Business Opportunities Page (FBO) and the justification will be made publicly available. 7. Actions to Increase Competition: There are no barriers to future competition. As a result of this task order, the Agile software development supporting the ACE program would be completed. Future requirements would be issued on a competitive basis. It is the intent of CBP to decommission the legacy mainframe system, ACS, by September, 2017 thereby reducing /eliminating mainframe license fees. If new ACE functionality is not developed and deployed as scheduled, CBP will be forced to keep its outdated legacy mainframe system running which is cost prohibitive. Also, having International Trade, PGA s, and CBP personnel maintaining interaction between two systems (ACS and ACE) for the foreseeable future to clear cargo and enforce trade regulations is not a viable solution. 8. Market Research: The Government technical experts conducted market research by reviewing DHS strategic sourcing vehicles such as the Oracle Broad Purchase Agreement and the DHS Enterprise Acquisition Gateway for Leading-Edge Solutions II (Eagle II) contract. General Services Administration (GSA) IT Schedule 70 was also considered in addition to T4NG vendors. This market research is an ongoing process continuously being conducted, as recently as May 2017. Based on the results of this market research, the Government s technical experts determined that the GSA vendors (Mythics/Accenture Federal Services) and T4NG vendors (Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc., Information Innovators, Inc., Leidos, Inc., Pro-Sphere Tek, Inc., and Systems Made Simple) reviewed are not capable of meeting CBP s requirements without duplicating efforts already conducted by SRA and incurring associated cost and schedule impacts as outlined in section five of this justification. 9. Other Facts: CBP continues to modernize its business processes to address the ever-changing and multi-faceted challenges presented by 21st century trade processing. CBP aligns ACE with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 2014 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review Mission 2: Securing and Managing Our Borders. ACE is a commercial trade processing system which helps reduce the Nation s vulnerability to changing threats without diminishing economic security, by providing threat awareness, prevention, and protection for the homeland. Specifically, ACE provides DHS personnel with automated up-to-date tools and information to help in admissibility decisions, before a shipment reaches U.S. borders, identifying what cargo should be targeted because it poses a potential risk and what cargo should be expedited because it complies with U.S. laws. ACE also supports cargo revenue collection by processing commercial manifest, bonds, entries, and entry summaries. ACE is the backbone of CBP trade processing and risk management activities and the key to implementing many of the agency s trade transformation initiatives. It is the Single Window, the primary system through which the international trade community submits data and documentation required by all Federal agencies for imports and exports, and through which the Federal Government will determine their admissibility. The Single Window supports U.S. economic competitiveness by reducing costs associated with harmonizing requirements, streamlining processes, and trade shipments. The Safety and Accountability for Every Port Act of 2006 (P.L. 109-347) directed that all Federal agencies requiring documentation for clearing or licensing the importation and exportation of cargo participate in the International Trade Data System (ITDS), an interagency initiative to establish a single system for the collection and distribution of trade data. In the second quarter, FY 2018, CBP anticipates to have completed the development and deployment of core trade processing capabilities in ACE and the decommissioning of corresponding capabilities in legacy systems. ACE s key stakeholders are CBP, PGA users, and International Trade members. CBP includes border and trade enforcement personnel who use ACE to process shipments arriving into the U.S. International Trade includes commercial entities that import, export, ship, insure and provide brokerage services to those importing/exporting goods into the U.S. PGAs include 47 government agencies responsible for the licensing and admissibility of cargo into the U.S. The objective of the ACE is to form a comprehensive system that enables CBP to interact with, manage, and oversee import and export cargoes and data, enforcement systems and cargo related financial management in order to provide end-to-end visibility of the entire trade cycle. ACE is considered a system that provides national security functionality. ACE will be the primary means by which agencies with trade-related and enforcement responsibilities will receive from users the standard set of data and other relevant documentation required for the release of imported cargo and the clearance of cargo for export.
 

Web Link

FBO.gov Permalink
(https://www.fbo.gov/notices/d846e83b12d1815218d89356b299058d)
 

Document(s)

Attachment
 

File Name: VA118-16-D-1016 VA11817F10160003 VA118-16-D-1016 VA11817F10160003_1.docx (https://www.vendorportal.ecms.va.gov/FBODocumentServer/DocumentServer.aspx?DocumentId=3681321&FileName=VA118-16-D-1016-002.docx)

Link: https://www.vendorportal.ecms.va.gov/FBODocumentServer/DocumentServer.aspx?DocumentId=3681321&FileName=VA118-16-D-1016-002.docx

 

Note: If links are broken, refer to Point of Contact above or contact the FBO Help Desk at 877-472-3779.
 

Record

SN04593481-W 20170726/170725085927-d846e83b12d1815218d89356b299058d (fbodaily.com)
 

Source

FedBizOpps Link to This Notice
(may not be valid after Archive Date)

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