Back Office Application Support and Modernisation

Post Office Ltd intends to directly award this contract under Section 41 of the Procurement Act 2023, relying on Schedule 5 (Direct award justifications) paragraphs 5 and 6 "Single suppliers" grounds because:

1. Only Accenture holds the necessary intellectual property rights for certain proprietary tooling, security operations and bespoke services support wrap that are essential to the safe operation of the current Services . Only Accenture can provide these elements of the Services during the term of the directly awarded contract; and
2. Accenture is the only supplier capable of delivering the Services during the period of the directly awarded contract. No other supplier has the requisite know-how and technical understanding of the bespoke system to support the existing Services during the term of the directly awarded contract. The tooling and support services are deeply embedded into the current operational model, including monitoring, alerting, automation, patching workflows, incident response etc. These services and tools are not currently documented, modularised or abstracted in a way that would allow straightforward transfer to an alternative supplier. Transitioning away from these services and tools would require parallel design, implementation, validation and handover activity, which is non-trivial and could not be safely achieved during the term of the directly awarded contract. Only Accenture could do this work while safely continuing to provide the Services to enable another supplier to take over the system.

The direct award is both necessary and proportionate, and limited to the period required for Post Office Ltd to prepare and conduct a competitive procurement for future service transformation. POL requires a supplier to provide the Services while conducting preparatory transformation design work. The Services include a complex mix of infrastructure as a service and platform as a service, components, integrations with Horizon (Post Office's electronic point of sale (EPOS) system) and numerous third party and internal systems, and tightly coupled identity, networking, security, logging, and monitoring dependencies embedded within Accenture's proprietary service wrap. There are no reasonable alternatives to the Services because no alternative provider could technically assume responsibility for the service wrap at this time without substantial redevelopment and high-risk of operational disruption. Initiating a change of provider during a period of significant business and operational change would therefore pose a substantive risk to service continuity and the stable delivery of core functions. The Services are critical to the ongoing operation of POL's business. POL cannot accept any gap in the continuity of the Services. Since only Accenture is capable of providing the Services during the period of the directly awarded contract, there is no reasonable alternative to the direct award.