The Post Office has taken a further step towards the replacement of its ill fated Horizon IT system.
It has published a planned procurement notice for a future contract with two lots, for a replacement service provider and for an electronic point of sale (EPOS) system.
This is part of a move towards a radical change in the Post Office’s digital infrastructure, after failures in the Horizon system – introduced in the late 1990s – were implicated in the convictions of over 900 sub-postmasters for theft, fraud and false accounting. Many of the convictions have now been overturned on the basis that the system provided inaccurate records of transactions.
It follows extensions of the contract with Horizon supplier Fujitsu and a move in April of last year to set up a provider panel to help develop a solution.
The new market notice indicates that the Post Office is aiming to have the contracts for the two lots in place by July of next year.
Service provider
The one for the replacement service provider will be worth an estimated £322 million to run for five years with a possible extension of two more.
It will involve taking over work from the incumbent within the data centres used for Horizon, with all the relevant technical management, migrating the data to a new cloud based back office with a zero trust security model and enhanced reporting capabilities.
The contract for the EPOS lot will run for at least 10 years, with a possible extension for two more, and has an estimated value of £169 million.
It involves the provision of a cloud hosted, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solution that would be future ready for the duration of the contract, ensuring it is compatible with existing systems, with responsibility for configuration, testing and roll out.
Features of the EPOS platform are expected to include a structured data layer or open standards integration to other COTS platform, and a modular service structure with a journey engine, point of sale service, capabilities for customer engagement and insights, retail integration, point of sale and options for pick-up and drop-off and self-service kiosks.