Description
SOLE SOURCE JUSTIFICATION 1. Contracting Activity: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Acquisition Operations Technology Acquisition Center-Austin 1701 Directors Blvd Austin, TX 78744 2. This requirement will be accomplished via a new firm-fixed-price purchase order using Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Part 13, Simplified Acquisition Procedures. The type of funds being used are Franchise Funds. 3. Description of Supplies or Services: VA requires the lease of one each Xerox DP2K115 G3U-100993 Printer System and PITC Xerox DP2K115 G3U-100041. The total estimated cost for a three-month lease with two three-month options is $149,914.80. 4. Authority Cited: FAR 13.106(b)(1): Contracting officers may solicit from one source if the contracting officer determines that the circumstances of the contract action deem only one source reasonably available. 5. Reason for Authority Cited: The proposed source for this action is: Xerox Corporation 7900 Westpark Drive, Ste A400 McLean, VA 22102-4214 This is a follow-on contract. Awarding this contract to a new source will result in $1.8 million of duplication of costs based upon the number of developers required, current rates, and time required to transition to a new source. More specifically, PITC was assigned a short-term printing project to assist the Chapter 33 Long Term Solution program-Government Issued (GI) Bill benefit letters for Veterans. In order to handle an increased print load of approximately 800,000 letters per month, PITC requires the lease of two additional large printing systems for on-line and batch printing. The large printing systems primarily consist of large scale printers and a central processing unit (CPU) that technicians refer to as a controller. The Variable Intelligent PostScript Print-Ware (VIPP) software that is installed on the printer system's Central Processing Unit (CPU) is proprietary to Xerox Corporation. During its 30-year use with PITC, the VIPP software was programmed with approximately 1,500 codes, referred to as applications by technicians. The VIPP software reads the codes and translates the request into the correct printing format for Chapter 33 GI-bill benefit letters, for example. The VIPP software is proprietary to Xerox Corporation, and they do not authorize any resellers to market these systems. Xerox Corporation holds all the licensed data rights to their product line, thereby making them the only responsible source to fulfill this requirement. In addition to PITC, Xerox Corporation's large-scale printing systems are used by the Hines Information Technology Center (HITC) to process Benefits Delivery Network (BDN) payment system letters for Veterans and their families. Another vendor solution would pose unknown risks that would cause extensive down time and reprogramming. PITC and HITC reported that changing systems would require a minimum two-year effort to redesign, recode, and test approximately 1,500 codes to properly function on another vendor's platform; information technology (IT) contractor resources; and assistance from the VA Office of Product Development. 6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: There is only one responsible source for this item. Efforts made to locate additional sources are described under the "Market Research" paragraph of this document. There is no competition anticipated for this acquisition. 7. Actions to Increase Competition: PITC intends begin the transition of large-scale printing requirements to the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) in Fiscal Year 2013, in line with section 501 of Title 44, U.S.C., which allows executive branch agencies to obtain their printing requirements from GPO. The VA product development team anticipates a minimum three-month time frame to transition to GPO, which entails the rewriting of approximately 1,500 application codes. 8. Market Research: Market research was conducted by Government technical experts from April 2012 through September 2012. The following production printing equivalent products were analyzed: Ricoh Pro C900AFP, HP Color LaserJet CP6015, and HP LaserJet CP6015xh. However, analysis revealed that only Xerox Corporation printers contain the proprietary software which has been customized for VA, it possesses over 1,500 legacy codes that have been developed over the past 30 years to meet the specific large-scale printing needs of PITC. 9. Interested Sources: No other source has expressed written interest in supplying this item.