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HomeMy WebLinkAboutMarket ResearchMARKET RESEARCH Contract No.: SOLE SOURCE Current Term: N/A Expiration Date: N/A Title: NC4 — STREET SMART Recommendation: ►/ Sole Source Contract ❑ Solicit Competition ❑ Access Contract ❑ Other Procurement Contracting Officer: TAHLIA GRAY Background: The Police Department has been tasked to locate viable resources to effectively communicate and solve crime issues. Police would like to purchase NC4 Inc.'s Street Smart, a safety and security solution system to better equip the force to protect and serve the City of Miami. It combines historical crime data and real-time, field intelligence in an easy to use interface that is great for mobility. Street Smart centralizes all crime -related data into a single data store for easy accessibility and enables officers to fight crime faster by having better information and creating increased situational awareness in the field, maximizing their effectiveness. NC4 Street Smart is an all-inclusive multiple solutions packaged system. This system includes a bulletins feature for communicating important information; use of the already procured CAD system for data collection and analysis; a collaborative blog to help shifts and units solve crimes collectively; an online notebook for more efficient case management when shifts change; and a map viewer application to analyze crime patterns allowing focus points for crime fighting. There is no current contract for these services. The following cities utilize the system: City of Pembroke Pines City of Tampa New Castle County (DE) City of Bloomington (IN) It is a one-time purchase that involves managed services on a 3 year plan. Please see Market Research Questionnaire attachment. Research Conducted: An internet search was completed looking for law enforcement crime fighting applications. There were a number of packaged solutions but none with all of the solutions provided by NC4. The closest alternative product was from Mark43. Unfortunately their product did not identify any crime mapping solutions in the package. There were no other agency contracts found during the search. The above cities procured the services via their municipality's sole source process for commission approval. Comparable Contracts: None available. Recommendation: Award as Sole Source; the best way to get all the features and access at the lowest cost. Employing multiple suppliers for different features could be expensive and inefficient to the field officers. Procurement Contracting Officer:, / I f-'[ Date: Procurement Contracting Mana•er: Director/Asst. Director: Date: 6 Date: (e. l Market Research Questionnaire Attachment Please provide the following information in order to document the sole source request: 1. Explain why the product/service requested is the only product/service that can satisfy your requirements, and explain why alternatives are unacceptable. Be specific with regard to specifications, features, characteristics, requirements, capabilities, and compatibility. Describe what steps have been undertaken to make this determination. NC4 Street Smart is the only real-time crime fighting application on the marketing today that provides the following functionality, features and benefits: • NC4 Street Smart enables officers to fight crime as it happens. The scenario of fighting crime in isolated shifts or cycles that do not communicate with each other is not efficient. Day old or week old communiques are no longer an acceptable standard. The goal of the new technology is to gain a dramatic reduction in the amount of time necessary to solve crime and make arrests. • Modern offender management is focused on identifying repeat offenders quickly thus preventing additional crimes. NC4 Street Smart provides fusion center capability at the officer, supervisor, and analyst level, providing data that can be used to pinpoint offenders, confirm crimes, and establish patterns. NC4 Street Smart provides easy access to structured and unstructured data that can be easily accessed with minimum effort in a central location. NC4 Street Smart enhances situational awareness at any level of a law enforcement agency. • NC4 Street Smart is a front line officer driven crime fighting application that supports police officers with critical near real time data while on patrol. Beyond traditional CAD and RMS searches, NC4 Street Smart enables officers to stay apprised of activities within a given patrol area as well as give personnel awareness to the actions of diverse agency departments. The awareness is bolstered by the use of data feeds, bulletins, blogs, case management, mapping, and search capabilities. • NC4 Street Smart is a proven solution and not a Beta effort. • NC4 Street Smart is a commercial off the shelf (COTS) crime fighting solution that can be implemented on site or offered through managed services (hosting services). The hosted and on premise software services provide standards relative to security, maintenance, and back up. • NC4 Street Smart is fully functional and proven in field use by police officers in the field. NC4 Street Smart is intuitive and easy to use on MDT's (mobile data terminals), laptops, and the desktop environment. • NC4 Street Smart includes core components that are part of an integrated crime fighting application. The modules or capability sets are provided: o Fusion or Crime Connection Collector: This feature collects data about People, Place, Activities (Blogs, Bulletins, Modis Operandi, Crime), and Assets (vehicles, property) and suggests possible connections between the data elements to the end user. This identification is in near real time and is relevant to crimes and/or cases. This information is presented through an intuitive and fast mechanism allowing officers to determine the relevance and logic of the associated data. Officers are then given the option to associate this data to a crime or case that is being worked. o Blogging: This feature enables an officer to begin or add to discussion threads that can be sorted, searched, reviewed, and shared with anyone in the agency. This commentary provides the backbone for collaborative problem solving, situational awareness and officer safety. The communication brings information to an officer's attention immediately and does not rely on shift to shift, cycle to cycle, traditional email, analyst reports, or standard change of shift roll call meetings. The blog data is also searchable content and is accessed by the fusion or crime connector mentioned previously. Users have a record of the blogs they have created in order to manage their own content. Updates to blogs are visually indicated to users. Users will also be able to alert themselves to changes in a blog on a daily, weekly, or instant basis via email. The fusion or crime connector collector can be initiated from inside the blog file. Alarms can be configured to alert users when their blog has been updated. o Bulletin Standardization and Management: Bulletins are used to keep track of offenders and to notify officers of important actionable data. The NC4 Street Smart bulletin feature shall centralize and categorize bulletin information in one web page, in near real time, delivering important and relevant bulletins to officers in the field. The bulletins can be sorted, searched, reviewed, and shared with anyone in the agency. The bulletins provide immediate information to all officers related to crime, offenders, intelligence, officer safety, and other agency communications. The bulletins provide a back bone for collaborative communication among all levels of an agency. The bulletin is brought to an officer's attention immediately and does not rely on shift to shift, cycle to cycle, traditional email, analyst reports, or standard change of shift roll call meetings. The bulletin content is searchable content and is accessed by the fusion or crime connector mentioned previously. Users have a record of the bulletins they have created in order to manage their own content. Updates to bulletins are visually indicated to users. The bulletin page focuses information on the crime fight and eliminates noise and clutter from other information sources. Users will also be able to alert themselves to changes in a bulletin on a daily, weekly, or instant basis via email. The fusion or crime connector collector can be initiated from inside the bulletin file. Bulletin Management allows for information to be stored in one centralized location, in near real-time and delivered to officers in the field. o Mapping, GIS and map viewing: NC4 Street Smart can leverage both commercial and Police Department maps using an ESRI based map viewer. The maps display icons that represent officer dispatches and confirmed crimes. NC4 Street Smart has the ability to surface icons to the map from identified data sources. Users can time slice views and have multiple options for displaying crime data. Blogs, Bulletins, People, Places, and Cases that have a valid address are also surfaced to the map and are viewed using icons. The options used for display contribute to officer safety and situational awareness. o Case Management: NC4 Street Smart is a collaborative tool that provides officers with an "on-line case file" where information can be shared between officers, supervisors, and analysts from shift to shift, cycle to cycle, rotations, or transfers in near real time. The case file is a collection point for notes, media, data relationships (people, places, activities, assets). The case file is created from a confirmed crime. Multiple users can be assigned to a case. Users will also be able to alert themselves to changes in a case on a daily, weekly, or instant basis via email. Users will be able to merge cases. The fusion or crime connector collector can be initiated from inside the case file. • Leverage Existing Data: NC4 Street Smart provides law enforcement officers with the ability to analyze data to draw conclusions that result in actionable items that reduce crime. This ability comes from a content aggregation data warehouse that is available to integrate with your own data sources. Data sources such as Offender/Juvenile/Home Detentions data allows officers to look up known offenders in a localized area, saving them the time of having to do a full-scale search. This includes known offenders and career offenders that have a relationship to the community served by the application. • NC4 Street Smart enables historical records import to allow users to identify patterns and threats around validated crimes to help officers solve crimes faster. The objective is to give officers a starting point when trying to solve a crime by leveraging technology to select logically related and relevant existing information. • NC4 Street Smart supports collaborative capability providing officers with an on-line notebook where information is passed from shift -to -shift and from cycle -to -cycle in real time? • CAD integration: PD CAD data can be integrated into the desired system. CAD records can be evaluated by system users to determine the validity of the record and qualify the crime. The "validation" of the CAD record is done through a form in the crime fighting system. This Crime Validation Form can also account for Intel and street address check data types. While this information may not be related to any CAD incident, it may prove useful at some point. It gives users the ability to capture data that seems important, but may not correlate to any specific CAD record. It allows officers to enter data that will become part of their common operating picture and is available for relevancy analysis and use when/if new information indicates relevancy. • Fusion Functions for the Officer: NC4 Street Smart will "connects the dots", allowing officers to quickly and easily find data in one place. NC4 Street Smart enables officers to quickly and easily find People, Places, Activities and Assets that are relevant to the crime they are investigating, resulting in faster action and better results. NC4 Street Smart identifies information in real-time that is relevant to solving cases. Officers in the field often remember certain historical data but due to difficult access or time lapsed, can't get that data. The desired system will access that information and present that data as potentially relevant. Essentially it will be a search engine working on your data. The desired solution will continually "crawl" data and immediately return matching results in an easily understood way, making related historical data very useful and productive. • Controls and Data Access/Use: NC4 Street Smart enables officers to manage the crime solving process more efficiently by allowing them to look up various data elements of a crime scene with a click of a button. These controls consist of easy to use and understand, repeatable controls including the following: o Grid Controls - users can select geographical areas from a set of quadrants o Persons Control - allows the user to create or look up a person and help determine whether they are a suspect, witness, known offender, victim or associate o Vehicle Control - facilitates the searching of the vehicle data type o Property Control - facilitates the searching of property data • Search Capability: NC4 Street Smart provides advanced search feature that allows a user to search for any previously entered data point in the solution. Any field that is available on any form is available for search for a specific entry. The information will be returned in convenient and easy to understand categories: People, Places, Activities, and Assets. Additional sort functionality will also be available to the user after the search. A sort function must give a user an additional mechanism to parse data effectively. • NC4 Street Smart is a server -based application hosted and supported as a self -hosted or vendor managed secure service. • NC4 Street Smart is a web -based application and is built on SharePoint 2013. • NC4 Street Smart supports the Microsoft ODS database structure. • NC4 Street Smart support searches from disparate databases from structured and unstructured data sources such as PDF's, Word Docs, Spreadsheets, Blogs, email etc.? All ingested data is indexed to enhance the search capabilities. • Historical crime records and other crime databases (Gang data, Sex Offender Registries etc.) can be imported into NC4 Street Smart and the data set is searchable. • NC4 Street Smart supports touch -screen functionality and is usable by touchable devices that meet the minimum display requirements such as touchable laptops, Microsoft Surface Pro (Windows IE 8+) devices, and IPad (Safari Current Version +2). • NC4 Street Smart includes key word search and spell check and works with IE10 and 1E11. • NC4 Street Smart supports a minimum resolution of 1280 x 1024. If NC4 Street Smart is accessed by devices with these minimums there are no horizontal scroll bars required. • NC4 Street Smart forms are HTML 5. NC4 Street Smart leverages a platform independent light weight HTML5 mapping client. • All Personally Identifiable Information is protected in NC4 Street Smart. Social Security numbers are masked so a casual glance by an unauthorized user doesn't result in personal information being stolen or misused. However, authorized users can utilize a fly over text display to view the social security number when needed. • NC4 Street Smart is adaptable to support the police methodologies of your organization. • NC4 Street Smart integrates into the Microsoft SharePoint 2013 ecosystem. • NC4 Street Smart supports Active Directory Federation and supports single sign on with Active Directory. • NC4 Street Smart has a track record for lowering crime. • NC4 Street Smart can be integrated with your CAD system and your RMS system. • NC4 Street Smart mapping functionality organizes category views into individual map layers that can be toggled on and off. For example, users can view burglary, armed robbery, home invasion, homicide etc. as individual map layers. These individual layers can also be filtered by a time interval. • NC4 Street Smart is based on Microsoft Fusion Core data structure. • NC4 Street Smart is designed for in car use. • NC4 Street Smart is optimized for wireless (3G, 4G) connectivity. • NC4 Street Smart allows pictures and videos to be added to support the crime fighting activities of officers in the field. • NC4 Street Smart has crime analytics capability for reporting and analysis. • NC4 Street Smart can be extended to have customized reports. • NC4 Street Smart has an API that allows easy integration into third party or home grown RMS and CAD systems. • NC4 Street Smart is configurable to meet the needs of the organization. • NC4 Street Smart allows fields and labels to be adapted to meet agency Lexicon. • NC4 Street Smart provides an Administrative Audit Trail of activities. NC4 has worked with a variety of policy departments to create this solution because a commercially available alternative does not exist. In cooperation with the Tampa Police Department, this solution was designed by law enforcement for law enforcement and field proven during the RNC held in Tampa in 2012. 2. Explain why this services provider, supplier or manufacturer is the only practicably available source from which to obtain this product or service, and describe the efforts that were made to verify and confirm whether, or not, this is so. (Obtain and include a letter from the manufacturer confirming claims made by distributors or exclusive distributorships regarding the product or service, if that is cited as a reason for this Sole Source.) NC4 is the sole provider of NC4 Street SmarttM technology and doesn't use any partners or resellers. Therefore, there is no other way to procure this solution. 3. Will this product obligate us to a particular vendor for future purchases (either in terms of maintenance that only this vendor will be able to perform and/or if we purchase this item, will we need more "like" items in the future to match this one)? NC4 Street Smart is a server -based application hosted and supported as a self -hosted or vendor managed secure service. NC4 is the only vendor who can provide maintenance for this solution although it can be hosted by Miami PD if elected. Miami PD will own a perpetual license for NC4 Street Smart but will maintain an annual maintenance contract for support services provided by NC4. This maintenance contract includes upgrades, bug fixes and general customer support to use the system. 4. Explain why the price for this product or service is considered to be fair and reasonable. NC4 has been awarded contracts by several other law enforcement agencies including Tampa Police Department and New Castle County Police in Delaware, via a Sole Source type agreement. Recently, NC4 Street Smart was selected under sole source in Pembroke Pines Police as well. Miami to receive same costs both for setup, licenses and Officer fees as those awarded in competitive bid process. NC4 provides a managed service to host the software/solution which includes: providing, operating, maintaining and managing the servers and network; data center security; and backups to Customer's Solution and data. NC4 will also install, operate and manage the Street Smart Solution, the hardware and operating system, and the telecommunications facility necessary for hosting Customer's NC4 Street Smart Solution. NC4's base Managed Services do not include disaster recovery or high availability, but these options are available for an additional fee. In addition, NC4 provides full -service 24/7/365 support services. For Miami PD to provide the same hosting services, monitoring and customer support, the expenses would traditionally be much higher and also include the need to hire additional personnel. 5. Describe the negotiation efforts, if any, which have been made with the supplier to obtain the best possible price. Miami to receive the same competitive prices as awarded by other agencies in competitive bid processes. NC4 pricing is fixed and Miami to receive the most competitive price offered. 6. Explain the consequences(s) to the City, including the dollar estimate of the financial impact, if this Sole Source is not approved. Cost of RFP process to competitively bid solution that has been previously bid by several FL agencies including Sarasota County Sheriff and Tampa Police Department. Savings include payroll of staff to create, evaluate and manage the RFP process. Additional savings achieved in crime reduction by crime reduction achieved by deploying the solution in a timely manner. Tampa Police estimate a total savings of over $500M in crime reduction as a result of their use of NC4 Street Smart. Gray, Tahlia From: Linda Johnson <Linda.Johnson@tampagov.net> Sent: Monday, June 6, 2016 1:13 PM To: Gray, Tahlia Cc: Karon Johnson; Blake Leonard; Kevin Frye Subject: City of Tampa Purchasing Department Hi Tahlia, The purchase of the Street Smart software application was purchased as a single source for various Law Enforcement Agencies under the Tampa Bay Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) Grant. The Tampa Bay Urban Area includes the following counties and the jurisdiction within them: Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco, Hernando, Citrus, Sumter, Polk, and Hardee Counties. The Port of Manatee is also included as part of the Urban Area. Linda J. Johnson, CPPB, FCCM Sr. Procurement Agent City of Tampa Purchasing Department 306 E. Jackson, 2E Tampa, Florida 33602 Linda .Johnson@tampagov.net (813) 274-7490 Office (813) 274-8355 - Fax 1 Gray, Tahlia From: Crawford, Clifton <CCrawford@nccde.org> Sent: Wednesday, June 1, 2016 9:39 AM To: Gray, Tahlia Cc: Crawford, Clifton Subject: RE: NC4 Good morning Tahlia, In reference to NC4 product/services, New Castle County did not bid their product/services and it did not meet our criteria for sole source. Have a great day. Clifton Crawford Purchasing Agent, CPPB New Castle County Government Phone 302-395-5262 From: Frieson-Jones, Latonya Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2016 2:51 PM To: Kowalski, Ruth; Crawford, Clifton Subject: NC4 I received a Phone Call from Tahlia Gray (city of Miami) She was asking questions about the Sole Source for NC4. She is requesting a copy of the Bid. I do not see it. TGrav@miamigov.com 305-416-1912 1