Added: Apr 14, 2008 2:27 pm
STATEMENT OF WORK
NSF Travel Information System
I INTRODUCTION
I.1 Mission and Scope
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the Federal Government that supports basic research and advancement of science by awarding grants to institutions for specific projects. NSF currently employs a staff of approximately 1200. Over one third of the staff is scientists, engineers or educators; one third is administrative and technical staff; one third is support staff. This contract is located in the Division of Administrative Services (DAS).
The scope of this contract covers real time (approximate) Web-based hosted travel reporting and advisory services.
II TASK BACKGROUND
Travel management is a significant part of NSF s business. In addition to coordinating travel for NSF staff, the agency manages and facilitates travel for thousands of reviewers who support NSF s grant-making process. In FY 2006, for example, NSF processed nearly 8,500 travel reimbursements for staff and approximately 14,000 travel reimbursements for NSF reviewers and attendees of other types of NSF meetings.
Staff and Meeting travel at NSF is not centrally managed; rather, each office within the agency is responsible for coordinating, tracking and reporting its own travel activity to meet Federal and agency travel policy requirements. NSF s Division of Administrative Services (DAS) administers resources and tools that NSF offices use in travel management. The services that DAS oversees, for example, includes the agency s central contract with SATO Travel for booking commercial air transportation as well as e-business applications such as the Guest Travel and Reimbursement System and FedTraveler.com. These applications permit travel to be booked and reimbursed electronically as well as provide access to data for reporting purposes.
NSF has identified the need for more comprehensive travel reporting and analysis capabilities. The NSF travel team (which is responsible for administering staff and meeting participant travel at NSF) recognizes the advantages to having access to a variety of real-time travel information to permit the agency to assess and respond more effectively to assist its travelers in the event that weather, airline industry or other emergency situations arise. In addition, NSF program offices have expressed the need for more complete information concerning cost and other details concerning transportation booked by their invitational travelers through SATO Travel.
The travel information to which NSF desires to have access is not private information, but is considered privileged with access granted only on a need to know basis. NSF has identified two primary sets of users:
Administrator Users These users will have the broadest access to the travel information system. Specific requirements for this group of users is described in section III.2 of this document
Standard Users The access of these users will be restricted as described in section III.3 of this document.
The complete description of the requirements for the comprehensive travel reporting and information tool desired by NSF follows in Section III.
III REQUIREMENTS
III.1 General System Requirements
The following services are mandatory requirements and needed by the NSF and must be accessible 7 days per week/24 hours per day throughout the year. All of these requirements must be met by the offerer at the time of award.
1. Electronic Travel Itinerary Collection and Management
The offerer shall provide a service to collect travel itineraries of NSF Travelers into a central database hosted on servers provided and maintained by the offerer. This service shall include the following features:
a. The ability for the systems of the offerer to seamlessly interface with the systems of SatoTravel to automatically collect itineraries for NSF Travelers who book their flights through Sato Travel.
b. The ability to search stored NSF traveler itineraries and access the data through a variety of Internet accessible reporting tools, that shall be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, as detailed herein.
c. Passenger reports, described later in this document, are required to be exportable to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and include the following column headers:
Meeting ID
Meeting Attendee
Travel Date
Airline
Origination
Departure Time
Status
Destination
Arrival Time
Price
2. System Security
The system shall include the following security features:
a. Require secure user login id and password. Passwords must be at least 12 characters long and use a combination of lower case and uppercase letters, numbers and at least one symbol (e.g., !, @, #, $, %, &,; ^, *, (, ) ).
b. Provide ability for users to maintain their own password as well as require users to reset their passwords every 60-days.
c. The ability to grant and restrict access to information in the system and certain features of the system by one of two classes of user, as detailed herein.
d. The ability to globally set user sessions to time-out after session inactivity for a predetermined period of time (30 minutes).
3. Technical Support
The offerer shall make available to the NSF access to technical support 24-hours a day, seven days a week. Technical Support is defined as support provided by the offerer to NSF to address System Down errors and outages where all of part of the service is inaccessible. Examples of System Down errors include, but are not limited to:
a. User s inability to login to the service
b. Failure of the Login page to display within a browser, and
c. Any complete failures of the hosted application once a User is logged in.
The offerer shall provide NSF with a phone number to access technical support from qualified technical support personnel in the event that system down errors or host outages occur.
In addition, over the period of the contract, the offerer shall provide the following additional services:
4. Data Base Back-Up
On a monthly basis, the offerer shall supply NSF a physical back-up, in the form of a CD, of the previous month s full NSF traveler data stored in the offerer s central database. Data on the CD shall be provided in two formats:
a. In Microsoft Excel spreadsheet format
b. As a comma delimited file.
5. User Documentation
The offerer shall provide a user manual that documents system operations for both administrators and users.
6. User Support
The offerer shall provide remote user support to be available during NSF business hours. User support is defined as support by the offerer to the NSF to address general product usability questions or training. Examples of general usability questions include, but are not limited to, support to explain how a particular feature works or how a particular task can be accomplished.
The offerer shall provide the NSF with a phone number to access user support from qualified support personnel in the event that its users need help.
7. Training
The offerer shall provide one-on-one or one-on-many training on an as-needed basis to support NSF s full ramp-up to regular use.
The offerer shall provide a detailed description of the services being provided and the accompanying costs.
III.2 Additional Requirements for Administrator Users
1. Number of Administrator Accounts
The offerer shall provide NSF, 6 administrator accounts.
2. Self Administration
The offerer shall provide Administrator accounts with the ability to self-administer the following capabilities:
a. User account creation
b. User account deletion
c. User password resets
3. Real-time Flight Tracking, Mapping and Reporting
For Administrator account, the offerer shall provide access to the following traveler services and information:
a. Flight selection
-- Automatically track flights with NSF Travelers onboard
-- Provide ability to manually select and track flights for which no record of NSF Travelers exists
-- Provide ability to track both commercial and general aviation flights
b. Display tracked flights
-- Display location of flights with NSF Travelers relative to map of the U.S.
-- Show airline/flight number of tracked aircraft to distinguish between them
--Provide ability to see following information for each flight:
Names of NSF Travelers
Booked flight number
Operating flight number
Departure airport, scheduled departure date and time, and estimated/actual departure time
Arrival airport, scheduled arrival date and time, and estimated/actual arrival time
Estimated remaining flight time
Flight status (Scheduled, Enroute, or Landed)
-- Provide ability to further filter passenger information by:
Passenger name
Booked flight number
Operating flight number
Operating airline
Booked airline
Departure airport
Arrival airport
-- Provide ability to quickly search for information based on traveler, or commercial or general aviation flight information
d. Filtering Tracked Flights
Provide ability to filter flights in order to focus on flights or NSF travelers of particular interest in the following ways:
-- Display all flights with known NSF travelers onboard.
Provide users the option to select additional flights to display based on one or more sets of the following conditions:
-- Airline and flight number for commercial flights
-- Tail number for general aviation flights
Some combination of the following criteria:
-- Departure airport
-- Arrival airport
-- Flight type (commercial and/or general aviation)
-- Airline
-- Aircraft equipment model number (e.g., B747, A320)
-- Aircraft class (e.g., helicopter, jet, propeller, turboprop)
-- Minimum altitude
-- Maximum altitude
Administrative users shall have the capability to temporarily restrict the display to a subset of such flights based on:
-- Passenger (Agent) name
-- Booked flight number
-- Operating flight number
-- Operating airline
-- Booked airline
-- Departure airport
-- Arrival airport
In addition, Administrative users shall be able to selectively enable or disable individual flights in the display, choose the color to use for individual flight icons as well as a color to use for each set of conditions above.
e. Flight Monitoring Support
Provide ability to monitor airspace around key airports
Display airport delays
4. Report Generation
For Administrator users, the offerer shall provide Web-accessible report generation capabilities available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, that provide authenticated users the ability to generate reports against stored data for the previous 90-days.
Users shall have the ability to generate the following types of reports:
a. Passenger reports
Generate passenger reports that contain the following information organized by airline/flight number:
Departure and arrival airports
Departure and arrival dates and times
Flight status
Passenger
Ticket price for each passenger
Use some combination of the following parameters to select data for the passenger reports as appropriate:
Starting and/or ending dates
Departure and/or arrival airports
Airline and/or flight number
Traveler name
PNR number
NSF Meeting number
Provide ability to output passenger report data in a form suitable for importing into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
Provide ability to print passenger reports
Provide ability to navigate within reports
b. Flight reports
Generate flight reports that contain the following information:
Airline/flight number
Flight type (commercial or general aviation)
Type of aircraft
Departure and arrival airports
Departure and arrival dates and times
Use some combination of the following parameters to select data for the flight reports as appropriate:
Starting and/or ending dates
Departure and/or arrival airports
Flight type (commercial and/or general aviation)
Airline
Aircraft type and/or class
Altitude
Flight number or tail number
Provide ability to output flight report data in a form suitable for importing into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
c. Reservation support
Provide ability to view airline schedules
Provide ability to look up information about specific airports, airlines, or types of aircraft equipment
III.3 Requirements for Standard Users
Users with the Standard User role will be limited to accessing only Passenger Reports (see description of report requirements in III.2 4.a.) for NSF meetings by NSF meeting id. The Standard User interface will incorporate one field, a data entry box, where a users with the Standard User role will enter a Meeting ID (e.g.: A084523) in order to generate a canned meeting participant report (the Passenger Report). This report will show the travel details of all meeting participants associated with a particular NSF Meeting ID. No other report generation methods or access to any of the other travel services to which Administrator Users have access will be allowed for this user type.
The offerer will provide NSF 80 Standard User accounts.
IV FUTURE REQUIREMENTS
The government reserves the right to exercise the following options at a future time and cost agreeable to the both offerer and the government. The offerer must meet all of these potential future requirements/capabilities at time of award of this contract.
Option I
The offerer shall provide Web-accessible reporting generation capabilities which provide authenticated users the ability to generate reports against stored data for both the current fiscal year and for a period of two months after the beginning of a new fiscal year access to all data for the previous fiscal year.
Option II
The offerer shall provide means to log users onto the offerer s systems automatically once their login credentials have been satisfied locally. This capability shall be provided on a user-by-user basis.
Option III
The offerer shall provide enhanced data feeds to include NSF-sponsored travel to select U.S. territories outside of the fifty contiguous states that comprise the U.S.A. and to select international countries.
Option IV
The offerer shall enhance reporting capabilities of the system by extending the system to draw additional traveler data elements (from the SATO Travel Passenger Name Record (PNR)) as may be requested by the NSF.
Option V
The offerer shall provide NSF access to user usage trends and statistics (data addressing who logs in, how frequently they log in and for how long) as requested by NSF.
V SERVICE AVAILABILITY
The successful offerer shall provide a turnkey system that incorporates all of the services described above and must demonstrate proven experience in providing the described services to Federal government agencies. In addition, offerers must provide documentation demonstrating that the hosted environment is reliable, recoverable and frequently maintained and backed up.
The services outlined in Section II.2 1 through Section II.2 6 shall be accessible 7 days per week/24 hours per day.
V.1 Notification of Scheduled Maintenance and Unplanned Service Outages/ Interruptions
The offerer shall notify the NSF of any scheduled maintenance that is expected to make the hosted services unavailable for longer than 15-minutes. Such notifications shall be sent via e-mail no less than one calendar week before the planned event. With rare exception, scheduled maintenance shall be performed on weekends (Saturday through Sunday) during the evening and/or early morning hours.
In addition, the offerer shall notify NSF of any unplanned system outages/interruptions experienced during the typical business hours of the NSF (Monday through Friday, 7:00 AM to 9:00 PM EST) as soon as the extent of the particular issue is known.
V.2 Service Restoration for Unplanned Outages/Interruptions
In the event of a service interruption or outage, the NSF anticipates that service will be restored within the following time intervals depending on the severity of the event:
1. Minor Outage the offerer will have up to 4-hours to restore service
2. Major Outage the offerer will have up to 24-hours to restore service
3. Catastrophic Outage the offerer will have up to 72-hours to restore service.
The offerer shall also communicate any/all known inaccuracies in the NSF data caused by such a failure and shall work to correct any inaccuracies within a reasonable period of time not to exceed 24 hours for minor failures and 72 hours for catastrophic failures.
VI PRICING
Offerors shall provide pricing for the first year of service for the complete solution described above. Offers shall also provide pricing for an additional one year renewal, should NSF decide to exercise that option.
VII CONTRACT PERFORMANCE
VII.1 Place of Performance
The hosted services shall be housed at the offerer s location and accessible to employees of the National Science Foundation via the Internet.
VII.2 Period of Performance
The term of the contract is one year with the optional renewal of one year, should the NSF decide that it is in the best interest of the agency to exercise that option; the potential term of this contract, therefore, is two consecutive years (24-months).
VIII GOVERNMENT FURNISHED EQUIPMENT
The government shall provide Internet points of access to its employees. The NSF expects the offerer s solution to be a hosted system that does not utilize any government furnished equipment.
IX CONTACTS
Please send any questions for this requirement to Timothy P. McLendon, Contracting Officer, tmclendo@nsf.gov
The Contracting Officer's Technical Representative (COTR) for this project is as follows:
COTR: Joan H. Goetzinger
ADDRESS: NSF, 4201 Wilson Blvd., Suite 295, Arlington VA 22230
The Technical Points of Contact (TPOCs) for this project shall be determined.
Added: Apr 15, 2008 9:10 am
EVALUATION CRITERIA
The Contracting Officer shall select for award the proposal that offers the best value to the National Science Foundation based on the three evaluation criteria listed below. The first two criteria, when combined, are considered more important than price.
1. Technical merits of the proposed solution
2. Past performance in providing similar services to other Federal agencies
3. Price
