SOLICITATION NOTICE
70 -- DoD Purchase Card Program Data Mining Tool Acquisition
- Notice Date
- 9/24/2004
- Notice Type
- Solicitation Notice
- NAICS
- 541519
— Other Computer Related Services
- Contracting Office
- ACA, ITEC4, Directorate of Contracting , 2461 Eisenhower Avenue, Alexandria, VA 22331-0700
- ZIP Code
- 22331-0700
- Solicitation Number
- W91QUZ-05-R-CARD
- Response Due
- 10/15/2004
- Archive Date
- 12/14/2004
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- This is not a Request for Proposal (RFP). The purpose of this Request For Information (RFI) is to solicit industry feedback regarding the development of the acquisition strategy and request for proposal for the Data Mining Tool acquisition. The purpose of the acquisition is to provide a tool that identifies fraud and misuse of the Government purchase card, i.e., unauthorized transactions by authorized cardholders. BACKGROUND: The focus in the early years of the DoD program was to encourage the use of the card wherever practical so as to streamline the procurement of small purchases and pass the internal savings on to the war fighter. The result was the issuance of over 230,000 purchase cards and purchases of more than $10.6 billion in FY 2001. However, the emphasis on the growth and business process re-engineered savings was somewhat at the expense of adequate operational controls. The General Accounting Office ( GAO) and the DoD Inspector General (DoDIG) issued several audit reports in the FY 2001-2003 timeframe identifying a wide range of implementation and internal control problems in the DoD charge card program. The lack of internal controls contributed to fra udulent and abusive spending, theft and misuse of Government property. These types of fraud and misuse are different than traditional charge card fraud in that they represent unauthorized transactions by an authorized cardholder. Since that time, DoD has taken corrective actions to strengthen controls over the program and has reduced the number of cards to a manageable level. In FY 2003, the Department of Defense (DoD) Purchase Card Program had reduced the number of cardholder accounts to approximately 1 20,000, however the card was used for over 10.7 million transactions totaling over $7 billion. Although significant progress has been made to improve internal controls, fraud and misuse continue to be identified. This has prompted the department to look for data mining capabilities. ADDITIONAL REFERENCE MATERIAL: More background information on the purchase card program may be obtained at the following website: Department of Defense Purchase Card Program Management Office at: http://purchasecard.saalt.army.mil/ and at http://www.acq. osd.mil/dpap/pcard/pcardguidebook.pdf. ACQUISITION STRATEGY ISSUES: SCOPE The Government has a requirement for a data-screening tool that, using a combination of a discreet DoD-tailored neural network model and Department of Defense (DoD)-specific business rules, will identify transactions at the most risk of being fraudul ent or abusive. The Government seeks an offeror who will also provide an authorization/issuance tool that creates user accounts that capture the necessary user attributes needed to support data mining capabilities. The Government seeks an offeror who wil l also provide a risk assessment tool that, on a monthly basis, provides a report card on the status of the internal controls of the purchase card program. At the DoD Program Management Offices discretion, the tool will be piloted at a maximum number of 4 sites. ACQUISITION OBJECTIVES: The objective of this procurement is to obtain a solution that efficiently, effectively, and economically reduces the risk of fraudulent and/or misuse transactions on the Government purchase card. As such, the primary objectives o f this acquisition are to: 1. Provide a database of at-risk transactions identified during analysis, modeling and simulation. The database shall include three separately identified universes of transactions: (1) neural network results only, (2) DoD-specific business rules only, an d (3) results with a combination of both (1) and (2). 2. Provide a data-mining tool that uses DoD data to develop a discreet neural network model combined with DoD-specific business rules to dynamically identify transactions at the greatest risk of being fraudulent or improper. 3. Provide a database to capture and maintain daily tr ansactional and quarterly merchant profile data feeds from the designated DoD card-issuing contractors. A subset of this database will be the responses to transactions selected for review. The database will maintain a rolling 12 months of data for online retrieval by designated program officials. Another 24 months of data will be archived for retrieval within 2 days. 4. Provide a vehicle for distributing selected transactions to the appropriate officials for review and resolution. 5. Provide a tool for creating user accounts, routing those accounts for approval, and sending a transaction to the bank to authorize issuance of the card. 6. Provide a risk based assessment tool that provides, on a monthly basis, a report card on the status of the internal controls of the purchase card program. 7. Provide a Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan that identifies specific methods for quality assurance surveillance and identification of specific actions to be taken by the contractor to control performance on the contract to ensure that it meets the req uirements of the Performance Work Statement. 8. Provide a user satisfaction survey that will be designed to capture user satisfaction and suggested enhancements. ARCHITECTURAL DEVELOPMENT: The successful offeror will play a significant role in creating the data mining and risk assessment tools. The Government will consider both new and existing system designs in both software and underlying hardware platforms to p rovide a high quality product. As soon as possible after contract award, a successful vendor must be able to provide a database of at-risk transactions identified during analysis, modeling and simulation; a vehicle for distributing selected transactions t o the appropriate officials for review and resolution; and a database to capture and maintain daily transactional and quarterly merchant profile data feeds and the responses to transactions selected for review. SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT: The successful offeror will have significant responsibility for the continued development and refinement of the data-mining tool. The Government seeks help in identifying user needs, back-end business application needs, and overall f unctional enhancements. The Government also seeks the establishment of strong processes to formalize the development and facilitate the prioritization of improvements. PERFORMANCE-BASED: Proposals will be solicited using performance-based service contracting principles including use of a Performance Work Statement approach for defining the requirements. TERM: The contract term is anticipated to include a base period of one year, with option years to be determined in the final solicitation. QUESTIONS: The Government is interested in obtaining the following information from industry to consider in determining its acquisition strategy and development of the RFP. 1. Is a managed service approach feasible or should the government provide all the hardware/software to maintain the data-mining tool and repository? 2. What specific detail or additional information is needed in order to propose on this requirement? 3. How would you recommend handling software-licensing issues? 4. What contractual incentives or disincentives would motivate outstanding performance? In what areas can performance most effectively be incentivized? 5. We are planning a two phases approach: (1) development and (2) deployment, maintenance and technological enhancements. What type of contract would be most beneficial to both the government and the contractor for development? For deployment, maintenan ce and technological maintenance? 6. What portions of work are suitable for small business participation on an effort of this size? 7. How do you propose ensuring the interoperability of the proposed solution with card issuing banks applications/processes? 8. For those charge card companies already providing charge card services to the government, how would you insulate your commercial charge card product lines from this product? 9. What additional data do you require to design and develop a workflow tool to facilitate an authorization/issuance capability? 10. What is a reasonable timeline for development? For deployment? What additional information is needed to plan for deployment? 11. What are your proposed strategies for minimizing the need for classroom training? 12. What data and level of support are needed from the DoD card issuing banks to support/enable the process How do you propose to comply with data security and privacy requirements? 13. What do you propose as meaningful performance metrics for the success of the project? 14. For internal fraud and/or misuse detection, how will your product ensure a high probability of detection of high-risk transactions while minimizing the amount of false positives? 15. For internal fraud and/or misuse detection, how will your product prioritize the highest risk transactions to enable us to optimize our resources for transaction review? 16. How do you propose making use of existing DoD infrastructure to minimize program costs? 17. How far into the future are you willing to commit your company to support this requirement? SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS: Responses to this RFI will be in the form of a White Paper, not to exceed ten (10) pages, with an optional Microsoft Power Point briefing, including notes, not to exceed ten (10) slides. Submit responses, via e-mail, to John Norw ay at John.Norway@itec4.army.mil not later than October 15, 2004.
- Place of Performance
- Address: ACA, ITEC4 Directorate of Contracting , 2461 Eisenhower Avenue Alexandria VA
- Zip Code: 22331-0700
- Country: US
- Zip Code: 22331-0700
- Record
- SN00681502-W 20040926/040924212127 (fbodaily.com)
- Source
-
FedBizOpps.gov Link to This Notice
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