The Crown Commercial Service (CCS) has launched the latest iteration of its agreement for procuring back office software solutions, with a new dedicated lot to encourage innovation from SMEs.
Named Back Office Software 2, it will replace the incumbent agreement, which expires in April, and according to the contract notice could be worth up to £5 billion over its liftetime, which is set to run for 30 months with an option to extend for another 18.
CCS said that 97 suppliers have been awarded places, of which 53% are SMEs, with large vendors including Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, and IBM also present.
The framework consists of two lots, one for the provision of tools including accounting software, payroll systems, customer relationship manager and enterprise resource planning solutions.
The other covers the same range of products but is designed for lower value, innovation solutions, aimed at encouraging buyers to procure solutions from SMEs.
Range of products
Product types covered are software for enterprise resource planning, human capital management, customer relationship management, payroll, payroll, finance, procurement and sourcing, workflow and content management.
For both of the two lots, buyers will have the option of procuring through directly awarded contracts or further competition. Customers can also buy associated services at the same time as their software including application design, systems architecture and data migration.
Philip Orumwense, commercial director and chief technology procurement officer at CCS, said: “This new framework provides better value for the nation through the use of cost effective and more efficient back office software solutions, freeing up civil service time to focus on providing services for citizens.
“It is yet another example of how CCS is helping to improve interoperability throughout the public sector by making it easier for organisations to link different back office computer systems and make better use of real time data whilst enabling the acceleration of modern digital government.”
