Postal Reporter Reader:

Employees should be allowed to review their electronic OPFs and other electronic information online at LiteBlue. 

 USPS RFI

1)Overview:

The United States Postal Service (USPS) has approximately 808,630 active employees.  This Request for Information (RFI) is for conversion services to scan and index documents in the Official Personnel Folder (OPF).  The purpose of this project is to support disaster recovery, the Human Resources (HR) Shared Service Center, and ultimately employee self service.

Employee records are important to the men and women of USPS and represent information of vital importance.  Legibility, accuracy and security are of vital importance because of the nature of these records.

An RFI and subsequent RFP have been previously released.  The RFP was cancelled because of changing business requirements.  This will be a best value procurement with a strong emphasis on costs, and vendor’ involvement in the previous process is neither positive nor negative in regards to this procurement.

USPS desires to contract with a supplier who has significant experience in high volume conversion of intermixed paper documents.  Furthermore, USPS’ officials have altered the overall acquisition and contracting process in order to better align with the private sector processes and encourage suppliers with significant experience to participate. Along this vein, it is the intent of USPS to release a Performance Work Statement (PWS) that describes what needs to be converted instead of dictating how suppliers should perform the work, including valid performance metrics that drive success.  The intent of this RFI is to derive a short-list of potential suppliers.

There are approximately 101 pages per OPF folder, but the actual number of pages in the folder to be captured is less.  A folder will include documents which are less than 8.5”x11”, greater that 8.5”x11”, duplex, color, onion skin and card stock.  Overall document quality is considered very good, although some documents have shaded areas.  The successful respondent will be expected to repair documents which are damaged only if the damage impairs the legibility of the document.  Some documents have instructions on the back which USPS does not wish to retain; however, other documents have employee information which must be captured.  There are also 8.5”x11” documents which are connected with perforations.

The USPS established a pilot eOPF site in September, 2003 and gained valuable experience that led to the decision to convert the remaining records.

The images and data will be stored in a system being developed by the USPS.  This system will support image retrieval, printing and retention.  Images transferred to this system must be securely transmitted to the USPS.  The associated index for each image must also be transmitted securely.  Security, tracking, and access will be required in ALL aspects of this project.  The facilities, staff, and processes surrounding data transmission, deletion of approved images, return of images which have transmitted and storage of hardcopy documents must comply with security requirements.

2)Issues and Options:

A number of things were learned from the eOPF pilot and although the immediate goal is to support disaster recovery, the HR Shared Service Center, and employee self service, the USPS realizes that they may want to work entirely from images at some point in the future.  The estimated number of document types is approximately fifty (50) and there is some variation in doc types based on historical changes.  Not all doc types are formal forms.

Secondly, there are documents which should be purged from the files.  As a part of this RFI process and other market research, the USPS is investigating whether it would be more cost effective to manually purge files prior to scanning or to scan all documents and delete those which will not be retained.  This means there are two basic scenarios: 

1.Purge the 82M pages and scan only the necessary pages (34-67M pages representing 36-73M images depending on unresolved issues)

2.Scan all the documents and then delete the unnecessary images.  This approach would represent approximately 88M images being scanned, but only the 36-73M images being retained

These numbers do not include blank back of forms or forms with instructions on the back.

USPS would like to explore vendor options to automatically identify and index document types.  A key issue is whether it is more effective for the documents to be extracted and scanned or for the entire OPF to be scanned and the non-relevant images then discarded.  USPS will be looking for respondent approaches which can apply proven technological approaches to minimize labor expended and reduce error rate.

Storage of the paper files may also be required.  Vendors may be required to store all paper files for up to five years or just work scanned for up to 90 days (for rescan purposes).  USPS will resolve the particular requirements prior to issuances of the formal RFP, but vendors should describe their processes for storing paper records and returning them to USPS on a folder basis.

Quality will be a key aspect of the project.  The USPS will provide a database of employee information that can be used to assist with indexing.  Respondents are encouraged to suggest accuracy metrics that USPS may use to incorporate into the solicitation as mandatory requirements.

USPS is interested in assessing the financial benefit to perform the indexing function off-shore however this option is dependent on a number of internal controls.

RFI (doc)