University of Southampton Soft Market Testing Exercise in Relation to the Provision of a Service Management and CRM System to Support the Univeristy's Enabling Services

The University of Southampton is currently exploring a range of System options to support its Enabling Services. The University is keen to explore all options that may be currently available in the marketplace.

The University's Enabling Service exists to provide support to students with a disability, including students with long-term health condition, mental health problems and learning difficulties. Students (and applicants) may access support through 1-1 sessions with a specialist practitioner, access to assessments, non-appointment based drop-in sessions, specialist workshops, and development of reasonable adjustments to ensure access to learning & study. The service provides direct support to 6,000 students through appointments, 1:1 support and other interactions; in addition through outreach activity, indirect support is provided to a potential further 5,000 students in line with growing service demand. The service is staffed by 18 core staff, 12 practitioners and 20 consultant assessors and support workers. Any system supporting this service would have around 50 back-end users, 30 concurrent.

The University is conducting soft market testing for a system solution that must include the following:

• Interactions & enquiry handling
• Service/Case/Task Management (record, assign, add notes/docs, update status, view, close)
• Appointment Booking, including wait listing
• Online self-service access for customers (make/view appointments, upload required documents, etc...)
• Online forms (e.g. screening/assessment form, service feedback form, etc.)
• Secure record keeping (Interactions, case notes, supporting documents, etc.)
• Recording charges and payments
• Reporting and dashboards
• Audit Trail
• Role based access, and partitioning between service areas
• Ability to interface with other University systems in order to share necessary data, e.g. financial packages provided by WPM and Agresso; Student Records System
• CRM (or link to another CRM) for bulk customer communications to a targeted population

This soft market exercise is intended to allow interested organisations with appropriate experience to outline their views and provide impartial information to the University with no commitment to themselves or the University.

It is not part of a formal procurement process nor shall the University be committed to carrying out such a process. The ultimate aim is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the various solutions available to the University to deliver the outcomes above.

This is not a call for competition at this stage.

Additional information: The University is utilising an electronic tendering tool (In-Tend: https://intendhost.co.uk/universityofsouthampton) to manage this Soft Market Testing Exercise (SMTE) and to communicate with suppliers.

All documentation in relation to this SMTE can be downloaded from the In-Tend portal.

Suppliers are advised that there will be no hard copy documents issued and all communications with the University including the submission of SMTE questionnaires will be conducted via the In-Tend portal.

If you are not already registered as a supplier with the University of Southampton, you will need to register in In-Tend in order to access the SMTE documentation.

Once you have logged in as a supplier:

click on 'Tenders'; locate the relevant project;

and click 'View Details'.

Once you are in the project screen, you will be able to register your company against the project and access all documentation by clicking 'Express Interest'.

Further instructions for the submission of SMTE questionnaires are below:

To submit your return:

1. Log in.

2.Click 'Tenders'.

3. Locate the relevant project.
4. View details.
5. Click on the tab relating to the relevant project stage (e.g. 'Soft Market Testing').
6. Click on the 'Attach Documents' button and upload your return.
7. Check ALL your response documents are uploaded and displayed in the 'My Tender Return' panel. The system will only permit your organisation to make one return.
8. Click the red 'Submit Return' button.

Please note, to preserve the integrity of the SMTE, all queries must be made via the correspondence function within the In-Tend portal.