Synergy Business Process Services

The Authority is seeking to engage the market to work with The Synergy Programme and its stakeholders to ensure the delivery of best in class, Value for Money (VfM), shared Human Resources (HR) and Finance Business Process Service (BPS) solution, which meet the needs of service users.

The Synergy Programme has been established to bring together the individual Department plans in line with the Government Business Service (GBS) published Shared Services Strategy for Government: this includes building a common operating model, BPS, single technology, and single commercial strategy.

The Synergy Programme comprises the following central Government Departments (Departments) and their ALBs.

• Ministry of Justice (MoJ);
• Department for Work and Pensions (DWP);
• Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA); and
• Home Office (HO).

DWP are currently the lead contracting authority for The Synergy Programme.

The prime driver of The Synergy Programme is to drive significant business transformation across four cluster Departments and their ALBs. The Synergy Programme, together with the successful suppliers will further develop a new Common Operating Model (COM) and introduce a new user-centric service including common data standards.

The COM design will continually evolve throughout the delivery of the Programme. As a result, benefits will also continue to evolve over time. This will help identify additional benefits for the Programme and provide more robust data and narrative to justify the current benefits profile.

The Synergy Programme will achieve its objectives for transformation of the back office services through investing in the development of a COM to drive a high level of convergence, the introduction of a high-performing, user-centric Future Shared Services Organisation (FSSO), development of standardised processes and introduction of common data standards.

The COVID pandemic, and the challenging fiscal environment that has followed as a result, has heightened the drive and need for more effective and efficient delivery by all Government Departments. Key to this ambition will be the ability to capture, manage and improve the quality of Finance and HR data to enable better informed decisions. The Synergy Programme will drive significant business transformation across four major Departments and their ALBs in support of this ambition. Additionally, the government has set out ambitious objectives to put sustainability at the heart of our government services. Greening government: ICT and digital services strategy 2020 to 2025 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) and Greening Government Commitments 2021 to 2025 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/greening-government-ict-and-digital-services-strategy-2020-2025.

The Synergy Programme has circa 250,000 employees between the Departments and their ALBs and the cluster Departments have a commonality of currently using the same outsourced BPS Partner, Shared Services Connected Limited (SSCL).

SSCL provide the current technology solution, the Single Operating Platform (SOP), shared by DWP, DEFRA and the MoJ. SOP is built around an Oracle eBusiness Suite 12.2.6 instance recently migrated from on premise to being hosted since October 2020 on a PaaS (Platform as a Service) Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) (these licences being procured directly by the Departments).

The Authority intends to undertake a procurement in-line with section II.2.4) Description of the procurement below. This prior information notice has been issued to update on the latest strategy, obtain insights from the market on specific topics via a Request for Information (RFI) and seek Expressions of Interest (EoI) through pre-procurement market engagement.

Nothing in this prior information notice is intended to commit the Authority to a subsequent procurement.