The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Office of Information and Technology (OIT) is seeking industry feedback to assist in the Government’s contract strategy determination for the proposed Application Development and Operations and Maintenance acquisition. This Request for Information (RFI) is issued solely for informational and planning purposes and does not constitute an Invitation for Bids (IFB), Request for Proposal (RFP), or Request for Quotes (RFQ). Nor does it constitute a commitment, implied or otherwise, that CBP will take procurement action in this matter. Responses to this notice are not offers and cannot be accepted by the Government to form a binding contract. CBP will not be responsible for any costs incurred in furnishing this information. The information provided in this RFI is subject to change and is not binding on the Government. All submissions become the property of the Federal Government and will not be returned. This RFI is intended to support the Government’s market research. The government reserves the right to conduct one on one communications with any RFI respondent for the purpose of further market research. Background: The mission of the Office of Information and Technology (OIT), within U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), is to deliver high-quality information technologies and services to CBP, other government agencies, the travelling public, and the international trade community in support of the agency’s day-to-day activities to secure the border and facilitate trade and travel. OIT manages CBP’s technology infrastructure and information and technology (I&T) operations to enable CBP mission readiness and improve the ability of all employees, including officers and agents in the field, to be proactive and responsive to new threats. OIT provides Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and CBP with 24/7/365 secure, stable, and high-performance information and technology. OIT enables the timely exchange of data and communications for more than 60,000 employees, 185,000 trade users, thousands of external law enforcement trusted partners, and tens of millions of individual travelers. The Assistant Commissioner (AC) of OIT serves as the CBP Chief Information Officer (CIO). The AC is supported by Infrastructure and Support Services (ISS) and Software Applications and Services (SAS), each of which are led by a Deputy Assistant Commissioner. This structure provides execution and oversight over the full scope of infrastructure responsibilities while encouraging a unified approach to enterprise solutions that serve the CBP mission and Trusted Partners. These (2) two organizations are supported by Cybersecurity, Governance, and Technology organizations to ensure all OIT solutions are secure, standardized, compliant, efficient, and sustainable. OIT must balance the daily challenges of delivering consistent access to secure data with the longer-term development of game-changing technologies that address CBP’s needs in real time, while managing budget, risk, acquisition, and workforce considerations. The Cargo Systems Program Directorate (CSPD) is a directorate within CBP OIT with the mission to deliver and sustain technology solutions that support the security of the international supply chain, foster U.S. economic competitiveness, intercept threats at the border and expedite the movement of legitimate cargo. CSPD is primarily responsible for the development and maintenance of systems and interfaces that support CBP, other Government agencies, and the trade community for import, export, and control of merchandise shipments. Also, CBP is the second largest revenue collector for the U.S. Government and CSPD is responsible for providing the capabilities to support this revenue collection and the information exchange with the trade community, other government agencies and foreign governments. CSPD manages the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system and the Advanced Trade Analytics Platform (ATAP) program. ACE is a collection of systems and applications built on diverse multi-vendor technological platforms. ACE, a commercial trade processing system provides DHS/CBP and other Federal agency personnel with automated up-to-date tools and information to help in admissibility decisions, before a shipment reaches United States (U.S.) borders, identifying what cargo should be targeted because it poses a potential risk and what cargo should be expedited because it complies with U.S. laws. ACE also supports cargo revenue collection by processing commercial manifest, bonds, entries, and entry summaries. ACE is the backbone of CBP trade processing and risk management activities and the key to implementing many of the agency’s trade transformation initiatives. It is the Single Window, the primary system through which the trade community submits data and documentation required by all Federal agencies for imports and exports through which the Federal Government will determine their admissibility. The Single Window supports U.S. economic competitiveness by reducing costs associated with harmonizing requirements. All ACE applications work in sync to provide an integrated platform for all cargo functionalities. In addition to developing software with massive lines of code and unit tests, the current system architecture must be maintained, and new architecture developed to support the expanding ACE environment. Finally, the vast majority of support required by ACE now, and in the future, consists of O&M support. Support for ACE is essential to the ability of CBP and other Federal agencies to execute their missions. Consequently, it is critical that ACE has the continuing technical resources and infrastructure to securely address new system functionality, need fixes, and maintenance issues that will arise within a cost structure mandated by Congress. A set of sample O&M metrics below for ACE show the incidents/issues the CSPD team encounters in a period as a representation of requirement magnitude: From January to August 2023, CSPD performed ~2,075 production deployments: ~1,855 deployments of cloud applications and ~220 deployments of legacy applications. From May to August 2023, CSPD received between 45 to 120 new incidents per week with an average of 81 new incidents created per week. CSPD teams resolved between 45 to 100 incidents a week with an average of 81 incidents resolved per week. From Jan – August 2023 there are: Severity Level Opened Closed Critical 3 3 High 1 1 Moderate 109 106 Low 2877 2710 Planning 390 359 Total 3380 3179 From January to August 2023, CSPD applications have a backlog of ~2,600 security vulnerabilities (all severities) with an average of 392 new vulnerabilities identified each month and 343 remediated per month. ACE’s key stakeholders are CBP Office of Field Operations (OFO), Office of Trade (OT), Partner Government Agencies (PGA) and the trade community. CBP includes border and trade enforcement personnel who use ACE to process shipments arriving into the US. Trade includes commercial entities that import, ship, insure and provide brokerage services to those importing goods into the U.S. PGAs include 47 government agencies responsible for the licensing and admissibility of cargo into the U.S. CSPD supports operational urgency to address new and emerging mission requirements that in many cases are regulatory or statutory in nature with mandated delivery dates. CSPD also provides technical implementation and support for the ATAP program which is a DHS Level 3 program within CBP’s Office of Trade. ATAP develops and improves trade analytic capabilities by exploring innovative solutions to tackle long-standing, complex trade enforcement issues by supporting the ingestion, integration and standardization of large amounts of disparate ACE and other trade data into a single unified platform. This platform provides users with the ability to develop and run advanced analytical models and dashboards. It will also provide agile analytical products that inform CBP’s trade enforcement strategy and policy in response to new and emerging trade issues and will deliver products to stakeholders that lead directly to enforcement actions. ATAP capabilities are Data Ingestion and Integration (DII), Advanced Analytics, Data Visualization, and Case Management. ATAP will standardize and integrate structured, unstructured, and semi-structured trade data from internal and external sources (commercial data, public e-referrals) into a single unified platform allowing users to easily identify trade relationships and patterns. Office of Trade users will use ATAP’s comprehensive data set to create and deploy customizable, complex analytical models, customized algorithms and prescriptive analytics to proactively guide the future of trade. Other CBP users will be able to conduct predictive trend analyses of high-risk combinations of data to proactively identify illicit trade (forced labor, intellectual property rights infringement, transshipment, Anti-Dumping/Countervailing Duties), discover emerging risk areas and patterns including customized automatic alerts. Trade data visualization allows data to be customized on dashboards; identify trends, behaviors, indicators and patterns for improving enforcement, and present quality data to defensibly communicate trade impacts to the White House, Capitol Hill, and other stakeholders. Importantly, ATAP will enable users to create a single view of fused data sources for use in advanced analyses and data visualizations. Acquisition Strategy: Acquisition Planning and Forecast System number (APFS) #: P2022059458 CBP is contemplating awarding a single-award five (5) year Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) against General Supply Administration (GSA), Multiple Award Schedule (MAS), (SIN 54151S) NAICS code 541519 – Other Computer Related Services, enabling expedited delivery of critical revenue collection and information exchange systems functions as needs arise through streamlined ordering. The predominant contract type for BPA orders will be Time and Materials (T&M); Firm-Fixed-Price orders may be used. A total small business set-aside is under consideration for this acquisition. A “firm” down-select process utilizing following source selection procedures is anticipated: Phase I Offerors will be required to address project scenarios applicable to the subject requirement to demonstrate offerors’ capability for supporting complex challenges. Offerors shall submit written technical responses to address the provided challenge scenario, as well as the proposed resources and skill mix to support the proposed approach. All responses will be evaluated and rated; only the most highly rated offerors will be considered for participation in Phase II. Phase II Offerors will be required to provide technical and management approaches; past performance and past experience in response to the Statement of Work (SOW) outlined in the solicitation. Offerors will also be required to provide pricing in sample task order using a government-prescribed Level of Effort (LOE). Offerors shall submit rates within the sample task order for the purposes of price analysis. The sample task order may be awarded with the award of the BPA or shortly after BPA award without further negotiations. BPA LCATS will be limited to those to defined in the RFP. Award will be made on a best-value trade-off basis, considering both Phase I and Phase II factors. CBP will consider feedback on other successful source selection strategies previously adhered to by Offerors for requirements similar in nature. Description: The anticipated scope of this support is defined in the draft Statement of Work (SOW) attached to this RFI. Responding to this RFI Information provided in response to this RFI must be limited to a five (5) page MS Word document submitted to the POC indicated in this posting. Interested parties should provide responses to the following questions (please use the question numbers to associate your responses to the proper question). Company Information: Provide background information on your company to include business size, socioeconomic status, and GSA MAS contract number(s). Include the point of contact (POC) information (name, email address, and telephone numbers). 2. Corporate Experience: Identify up to four (4) existing or recently completed contracts including scope, and/or level of effort that are similar in scope and scale to this requirement. In particular, CBP seeks corporate experience supporting: Performance of software development of new requirements, operations/maintenance/sustainment for critical nationwide government program(s) requiring strict standards and guidelines using agile methodology and principles, relevant to the size, scope and complexity as the work outlined in the attached Draft SOW; IT support services for security audits, annual security self-assessments, and other IT security services; Application and database migration to cloud services and subsequent legacy system disposition including retirement planning, documentation, and archiving; Large-scale (100s Terabytes) database migrations from on-prem hosted proprietary databases to AWS services and migrating from on-prem hosted solutions to cloud offerings for data warehouses, data lakes, and analytics tools for reporting and analytics; and Implementing solutions using Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials. Please provide the following for each of the identified contracts: a. Contract number, FSS or BPA number, or task order number b. Agency c. Period of performance d. Description of services e. Contract/task order/BPA total amount f. Contract type g. Brief description of requirement indicating how it is similar in size, scope, and complexity to the tasks identified within the draft SOW h. Applicable language/framework/platform (i.e. experience using Java, JavaScript, Salesforce, AWS, Oracle, IBM Technologies etc.) i. Implementation using continuous integration and continuous delivery tools and practices following secdevops principles j. Agile performance metrics evaluated k. Volume of system defects and security vulnerabilities addressed l. Point of Contact (name, phone number, e-mail address) 3. Corporate Interest and Capabilities: Provide your firm’s interest in the CSPD Application Development and Operations and Maintenance solicitation. Does your firm intend to bid as a prime contractor in response to the forthcoming solicitation? If proposing as a prime does your firm anticipate teaming/subcontractor agreements in performance of the tasks contained within the SOW? Does your firm intend to leverage a GSA Contractor Team Arrangement to deliver its proposed solution? Will your firm be pursuing this opportunity as a subcontractor? From your experience, what evaluation strategies and award factors are most effective at differentiating offeror capabilities in procurements of this scope? What capabilities or qualifications does your firm possess that would set it apart in performing the tasks described in the SOW? Considering the contemplated acquisition strategy provided in this RFI, what methods does your firm recommend to enhance and streamline the proposal and evaluation process? 4. Other Risks and Issues: Are there any issues or questions you have regarding performing the scope of work as defined in the draft SOW attached to this RFI? Please note the government does not intend to respond directly to any such questions or recommendations and is collecting this information for market research purposes only. Instructions: Interested parties are encouraged to respond to this notice if they have the capability and capacity to provide the identified services. Submissions are due by 5:00 EDT, Friday, October 30, 2023. Note: CBP has issued an RFI (#1664348) under the General Services Administration's E-Buy Federal Procurement Module. The RFIs shall be submitted via email to:
[email protected] with the subject line " Cargo Systems Application Development and A&E Support RFI" to be considered. All responses must adhere to the page limits of 5 pages total. Primary Point of Contact: Roderic Collins Contract Specialist
[email protected] Secondary Point of Contact Claire A. Hamilton Contracting Officer
[email protected] Attachment: DRAFT Statement of Work