Pre-Request For Proposal (RFP) / Request For Quotation (RFQ) Activities and RFP/RFQ Release

Contractor Proposal

Proposal Evaluation

Negotiation

Contract Award

The NCoO generated utilizing this guide will provide potential bidders an understanding of specific NATO needs for technical information throughout all relevant life-cycle activities of the defence system. The relationship of the NCoO to the various contracting steps is shown in figure 1-1.

Pre-Request For Proposal (RFP) / Request For Quotation (RFQ) Activities and RFP/RFQ Release

The NCoO planning process should start as early in the acquisition process as possible. The NCoO is a document that is prepared during the acquisition planning and requirements determination activity for each procurement. It is used to provide information to potential offerors about NATO's or the NATO nations' infrastructure and CALS implementation strategy for defence systems. The process for gathering the NCoO information should simply be part of the overall data call conducted during the pre-RFP/RFQ activities. A NCoO survey should be distributed to the functional organizations to gather the information.

Development of a NCoO will help ensure that NATO / NATO nations, referred to, from now on, as the CUSTOMER, receives the correct version and formats of digital data products needed to acquire and support a defence system. The NCoO can assist the project manager in determining:

• The hardware and software systems the customer has, or is developing, to manage and use the data;
• Data users, types of data, frequency of use, and timeliness of data access or delivery to each user;
• Data use and the review and/or approval processes to support life cycle functions;
• Users' locations and their primary functions in support of the defence system;
• Data interchange requirements including format, media, applicable standards, and existing telecommunications capabilities;
• Access authorizations and restrictions;
• Data acceptance requirements including data format and content of data and the customer processes for accepting product, processable, or Contractor Integrated Technical Information Service (CITIS) data.

Contractor Proposal

Referencing the NCoO, potential bidders should be required to develop a Contractor's Approach to CALS (CAC) in their prepared responses to the RFP. The CAC is a description of the contractor's approach, experiences, and successes in the creation, management, use, and exchange of digital information identifying capability in the area of CALS. The CAC can then be evaluated by the customer during the source selection process. If CITIS requirements are included in the RFP, the contractor should address the approach to CITIS within the CAC.

Bidders should be encouraged to identify, within their CAC, a more efficient and more cost effective data strategy and to propose alternative forms of delivery of digital data products and information services that reduce life-cycle costs and improve business processes.

Proposal Evaluation

Information in the CAC is used to gauge the risk associated with the contractor's ability to provide the digital data products and services required by the RFP.

Negotiation

Differences in concepts of operation between the customer and the bidder selected through the source selection process become a subject for negotiation. The agreements reached during negotiation become the basis for a contract that triggers feedback to all involved in the support of the defence system and subsequent changes to the NCoO and perhaps the CAC.

Any selected alternatives proposed by the contractor must also be incorporated into the contract and appropriate Contract Data Requirements List (CDRL).

Contract Award

The solicitation and ensuing contract should state that an objective of the acquisition is to require the contractor to generate information products for development and production functions in an integrated information system and a shared data environment to the maximum extent practicable. Ideally, this integration should be achieved as part of a comprehensive concurrent engineering strategy. The integrated environment will provide for generation, storage, indexing, distribution, access, and delivery of digital technical data products in support of defence system development and production functions and processes. The objective is to create each data element once and use it repeatedly in subsequent processes without manual reentry work and labour costs.

Developing this integrated environment will most often require a phased approach for implementation. To facilitate a phased implementation of the CALS strategy, the program manager may wish to require a CALS Implementation Plan (CALSIP) as a contract deliverable (typically 60 days after contract award) that is maintained throughout the life of the contract.