ICT Escalator Web Application Customer Journey

ICT Escalator is a 3 year ERDF project from the 2014-2020 programmes which is being led by the University of Bedfordshire. The project provides a first connection between SME businesses and Universities to support businesses to trade online. It will operate across the South East Midlands, an area which covers Aylesbury, Banbury, Bedford, Bicester, Daventry, Kettering, Leighton Buzzard, Luton, Milton Keynes and Northampton.

The objective is to provide 150 businesses across the geography with a short, expert intervention looking at how a business might use online trade as a way to access new markets or offer new products or improve productivity. A second element of the project is the grant element whereby a business may apply for a grant of between £1-15,000 at a 30% intervention rate to deliver the plan laid out in stage 1. Businesses will be supported to deliver new to market and new to business products and services. Additionally 55 new businesses will be helped to start up from scratch.

The University of Bedfordshire is the Accountable body and is responsible for the delivery of outputs, project management and financial accounting and compliance with ERDF regulations. Any contract resulting from this enquiry is issued under the University's terms and conditions including payment terms.

System requirements

Overall

The University needs to have a system in place to track and manage the delivery of the project. This brief is to procure this system. The purpose of the system is to automate as much of the processes as possible, providing an auditable, low-carbon method of managing approximately 300 small-data-volume users. It is unlikely that the system would have to cope with more than 15 concurrent users.

The system will be a web based application with role-based restricted access to many areas of the site. Our preference is for an open-source content management system such as Drupal or Wordpress operating through a cloud hosted environment. This must be compliant with CESG Cloud principles found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/implementing-the-cloud-security-principles/implementing-the-cloud-security-principles

Additional information: Please submit your tender return and any correspondence through the University's procurement website: https://in-tendhost.co.uk/universityofbedfordshire/aspx/Home