Faculty Information Systems

The Board of Trustees of the University of Arkansas, acting on behalf of the University of Arkansas, located in Fayetteville, Arkansas (UA) is seeking bid proposals from qualified and reputable Respondents to provide a Faculty Information System (FIS) pursuant to the specifications, terms and conditions stated in this RFP (“Proposal(s)”).

The University currently utilizes a web-based Faculty Information System (FIS) to support faculty activity reporting and annual reviews, along with SharePoint-based promotion and tenure workflows. UofA is seeking an FIS with enhanced functionality that will support business processes and operational workflows more effectively and efficiently. [...] The proposed modern, cloud-based, multi-tenant platform must support approximately 1,500 faculty members and 150 administrators.

UofA is seeking to award a term contract for this platform to the Respondent that can provide the best overall value to the University.

The successful respondent will provide, configure, implement, migrate, train, and support a secure, SaaS FIS platform covering modules below, with documented Application Programming Interface (API) and integration capabilities.

Functional Modules

• Faculty Profiles & Activity Reporting: Establish a single institutional faculty record that serves as the source for faculty reporting, reviews, promotion workflows, and analytics.
• Annual & Third-year Reviews and Workflows: Digitize and streamline annual and third-year review workflows across the institution.
• Promotion & Tenure Evaluation and Workflows: Digitize and provide a comprehensive workflow for promotion and tenure evaluation integrated with the annual reviews across the institution.
• Workload & Effort Tracking and Workflows: Provide visibility, tracking, and workload effort change workflows related to faculty responsibilities and workload distribution efforts across semesters.
• Faculty Lifecycle Management: Track faculty career progression and academic milestones through an integration with Workday and digitize workflows that exist outside of Workday.

Technical Requirements

• SaaS, multi-tenant architecture hosted in U.S. datacenters, with SOC 2-type controls, documented uptime SLAs, and disaster recovery RPO/RTO.
• System must be able to secure and encrypt data at rest and in transit.
• Single Sign-On: Support SSO and Identity and Access Management through InCommon and/or Microsoft Entra.
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA compliance; responsive design for mobile; user-friendly forms and task queues.

Implementation

• Provide a phased implementation plan (Discovery Configuration Integrations Data Migration Training Go-Live Campus-wide Adoption), with a typical timeline based on university scale. Include key milestones and deliverables.
• UofA anticipates an initial go-live date no later than **August 1, 2027**, for faculty profiles, activity reporting, and annual reviews, with additional modules implemented thereafter based on the phased implementation plan and project timeline.
• Finalists will be invited to provide a presentation/demonstration and a sandbox environment (**required no less than 9** users).

**Submission:** Submit all proposals to *UA Formal Bid Submission*. Take care to choose the CORRECT BID NUMBER from the dropdown menu. Under no circumstances will late bids be accepted.

**Bid opening:** The bid opening event will be conducted at the date and time specified via Microsoft Teams. Attendance of RFP opening is not required.

**Pricing:** Respondents must provide detailed/itemized retail pricing on the *Official Bid Price Sheet*. Pricing must be valid for one hundred twenty (120) days following the bid Proposal due date and time. Upon bid award, all pricing and/or discounts must be firm for a period of three (3) years.

**References:** Respondents must provide a minimum of three (3) references, preferably in higher education.

**Contract term:** The term shall be for an initial period of three (3) years, with option to renew at the end of the contract term for four (4) additional years, for a combined total of seven (7) years (or 84 months).

**Evaluation:** Value will be determined by UofA based on the overall competence, compliance, format and presentation of each RFP response and in-person presentation, as necessary.