Hosting and support for finance system

Bristol City Council (the "Authority" or "BCC") is wishing to procure a support and hosting service for its existing Unit 4 Business World system ("UBW") used for Finance, which was implemented in 2012 and operational from April 2013. BCC has an in-house team of 6 FTE who support day to day application administration and maintenance such as report development, user administration, support calls from end-users, initial fault fixing. Any support required above this is provided by the current support provider and forms part of the opportunity. Over the life of this contract BCC are looking to drive significant improvements in finance processes across the Council and looking to automate many of the current manual processes. BCC want to improve end-user experience, with regard to the quality and availability of information used in decision making across the organisation. Part of our requirements on commencement of the new contract is a comprehensive health check on the current setup and use of the system to inform a development plan to support these objectives. This also includes improving our system performance in particular by changing the way our system stores BLOB files. This contract underpins a core business system of the utmost importance to the organisation. With this in mind, BCC is looking for a strategic partner not merely a service provider. Please see tender documentation for further information on this opportunity.