Brief
The Agency for Payments and Intervention in Agriculture (APIA) is launching a procurement procedure to award a framework agreement for 36 months for "Preventive and Corrective Maintenance Services (software and database maintenance and administration, incident management) for the IPA-ONLINE application." The IPA Online application is a crucial IT element in the system for collecting, digitizing, and verifying data submitted by farmers in payment campaigns conducted by APIA until 2025. Although the application is no longer used for operational processes related to current campaigns, it remains essential for consulting, analyzing, and utilizing historical data from periods prior to 2025. In this context, maintaining the functionality of the IPA Online application is necessary to meet institutional obligations regarding access to historical data, conducting administrative checks on past campaigns, providing information to APIA's internal structures, and ensuring the traceability and auditability of the data managed in the system. Since the application remains operational and accessible to APIA staff, it is mandatory to ensure a minimum level of technical support for: • Corrective maintenance, necessary to remedy errors in the functioning of the application components, including GIS and those involving access to historical data; • Preventive maintenance, necessary to maintain the technical stability of the application, prevent performance degradation, monitor software services, and avoid incidents that could affect the integrity or accessibility of historical information. A framework service agreement will be concluded for a period of 36 months with a single economic operator. Based on the framework agreement, service contracts will be awarded, which will constitute the legal basis for payment, depending on the needs of the contracting authority. The service contracts will be concluded in accordance with the unit prices for the category of services provided in the framework agreement and within the allocated budgetary funds. The updated unit prices provided in the framework agreement will govern all subsequent contracts to be awarded during the execution of the framework agreement. In these conditions, the framework agreement will be governed by specific unit prices for the category of services to be provided within this framework agreement, namely: monthly unit prices for preventive and corrective maintenance services, which will serve as the basis for awarding all service contracts concluded during the execution of the framework agreement. If the contracting authority submits a request for the conclusion of a subsequent contract to the economic operator who signed the framework agreement and they respond that they do not have the capacity to meet this requirement due to their own fault, they will face the consequences provided in the framework agreement for non-fulfillment of their obligations. Duration of the framework agreement: Duration in months: 36 months. The framework agreement will be concluded with a single economic operator. Estimated timeline for the application of the framework agreement procurement procedure: It is estimated that the framework agreement will be applied in the period: 2026 – 2029. • It is estimated that a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 3 service contracts will be awarded, depending on the needs of APIA, whenever this need arises. For preventive maintenance, monthly support will be provided across all working environments for the entire duration of the framework agreement. During the framework agreement, depending on the needs identified by the beneficiary, service contracts for preventive and corrective maintenance will be concluded. Economic operators can request clarifications up to 18 days before the deadline for submitting offers. The contracting authority will prepare and post responses to all clarification requests submitted within the above timeframe on the SICAP platform on the 11th day before the deadline for submitting offers.
