Soft Market Testing Exercise for a Library Management System

Nottingham Trent University (NTU) wants to invite suppliers to participate in a pre-procurement market engagement or soft market testing exercise regarding the intended procurement of a library management solution (LMS). We wish to engage in discussions prior to formulating our final procurement strategy and finalising our requirements.

This exercise is to help us to assess the maturity and depth of the marketplace, and also to understand what kinds of solutions could potentially meet our requirements. The process will also inform and scope the intended future procurement exercise, and help interested organisations understand our requirements.

At this stage, we will not be formally assessing proposals, so nothing provided at this stage will be evaluated as part of any future procurement process. We welcome responses from organisations who feel that they have ideas on how our vision can be delivered, and comment on the extent to which our requirements are reasonable, realistic and properly specified. .

Please then provide responses to the questions in the document and return it via email to david.bailey02@ntu.ac.uk by 15:00 on the 1 November 2019. Following receipt of the responses, and depending on the information obtained, we expect to invite a maximum of five respondents to attend separate open-dialogue workshop sessions to present and discuss their responses during November.

A decision will then be made internally on the best procurement approach to take. Organisations not attending a session will not be disadvantaged in any future procurement, as this pre-procurement market engagement is only an exploratory fact-finding exercise: it is not an invitation to tender or a request for formal expressions of interest.

Any supplier invited to present or provide information to NTU is doing so to support pre-procurement market research only, to help make any future procurement more focused and efficient, and to clarify NTU's requirements. The expected formal procurement process will start only after completion of this pre-procurement market engagement or soft market testing exercise.