The General Services Administration has laid out the specific functions a private-sector shared-services provider must meet to offer services under the Human Resources Line of Business Consolidation effort.
In a pre-solicitation notice and statement of objectives released yesterday, GSA, for the Office of Personnel Management, is asking vendors to provide three core functions and some or all of nine noncore functions.
OPM had said GSA was to release the statement of objectives last Friday and even sent out a press release. But GSA did not release the documents until the following Thursday.
“The successful offeror must propose a management and technical approach to the successful operation of a shared service center that will deliver quality human resources and payroll services to federal agencies,” the statement of objectives said.
When GSA opens the multiple-award contract 738.X for proposals around March 15, vendors will submit a bid for a special item number. The contracts will be for five years with three, five-year options, which is the typical length of a Federal Supply Schedule contract.
The core services are:
Personnel action processing: The vendor will provide a system that can initiate and process a personnel action, which includes data on employee status, changes to their status and other key employee data, and save the data online.
Compensation management: GSA and OPM want companies to provide a system that supports discretionary and alternative pay programs, including award and bonus pay-outs, work schedules, leave processing, end-to-end payroll processing, annual pay adjustment processing and other functions.
Benefits management: Under this function, GSA and OPM said vendors should provide an online application to handle functions such as active benefits enrollments based on predefined rules and make benefit participation data available to benefit providers.
The nine noncore services are:
Human resource strategy
Organization and position management
Staff acquisition
Performance management
Compensation management, which includes functions separate from the core capabilities
HR development
Employee relations
Labor relations
Separation management.
GSA will hold a pre-solicitation conference in late February and is accepting comments until Feb. 16.
