The Government intends to solicit and award a sole source 8(a) contract to Creative Ideas Simple Solutions, Inc. to perform the following work effort. The Integrated Partner Management (IPM) Initiative is a strategic effort that will, through process reengineering and process automation provide, in one solution, improved eligibility, enrollment, and oversight processes used to manage partner entities (i.e., schools, school servicers, lenders, lender servicers, guarantee agencies, private collection agencies, state agencies, federal agencies, accrediting agencies, auditors, and owners) as they administer Title IV Financial Aid for students. Today, many Department of Education (hereafter also referred to as ED or the Department) Federal Student Aid (FSA) applications manage these processes, which result in duplicate and conflicting data storage, complex system architecture, excessive file exchange activities, and the lack of a centralized view of partners. The IPM Solution will reduce these issues, ensuring that all customers and employees have access to the same, current, institutional eligibility, enrollment, and oversight data. Schools, lenders, guarantors and other partners are located throughout the world. FSA's monitoring and oversight staff are located at FSA headquarters (Washington, DC) and throughout the U.S. in ten regional offices. The IPM Solution will be a single implemented system, ultimately transitioning all functionality from the current legacy systems. In general, the requirements for the overall IPM Solution were developed based on partner management business needs. The IPM Initiative goals are to: 1. Improve staff efficiency by providing a more effective tool set for case management and a seamless repository for information access & retention, 2. Provide a scalable platform to satisfy future requirements, 3. Reduce FSA's risk and reliance upon out of date and unsupported technologies, 4. Increase assurance that our program compliance support technology is recoverable after a disaster, 5. Establish a base of information that is more accessible and more secure, and 6. Provide efficient processes to meet internal and external reporting requirements. The scope of this effort includes the technical design and development of user interfaces, software/application, systems implementation, integrated solutions, and COTS customization.
