Request for Information (RFI) at the United Nations Secretariat

The United Nations Secretariat is one of the six major organs of the United Nations, with the others being the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the defunct Trusteeship Council, and the International Court of Justice. The secretariat is the UN's executive arm.

Applications are invited for:

Title: Request for Information (RFI) - Supply Chain Control Tower

RFI Number: RFIUNPD19798

Description of Requirements
The Office of Supply Chain Management is looking to further enhance its capabilities by implementing a 'Supply Chain Control Tower.' Control Tower is to transform UN Supply Chain operations and respond swiftly and efficiently to pandemics, natural disasters, political and humanitarian conflicts, and other conditions in which the United Nations operates. Through the implementation of control tower the office would like to combine people, processes, data, and organization, facilitated by appropriately combined technology elements to drive more intelligent decision making and speed up the action. One of the United Nations' primary objectives is to support peacekeeping operations. It runs multiple interdependent business areas, such as medical for staff and troops, engineering to run facilities, transportation for staff and troops, and technology equipment and services for running operations. The control tower aims to provide that overall visibility across the supply chain and horizontal visibility across the business areas.

The goal is to capture, normalize, connect, and use data to provide enhanced near-real-time visibility and indepth analysis to enable better short-term and midterm decision-making aligned with strategic organizational objectives. In essence, answer the question of 'What's Happening in my Supply Chain right now?'

This high-level objectives are:

• Visibility for decision making:
  • Operational level decision making The Control tower should provide data to facilitate operational-level decisions related to inventory, transportation/logistics, demand and supply planning, source to aquire, supplier performance. Control tower should also provide visibility across business areas and provide data to facilitate the overall strategy of each business area, whether it be to reduce the carbon footprint or other goals.
  • Strategic level decision making Control tower should provide data to facilitate tactical and strategic decision-making that changes the course of regular operations and identify improvements that have a cost or a service level impact.
• Ability to act based on the real-time visibility:
  • Make predictions and solutions to address problems (AI component), engaging users to make decisions and for certain scenarios make automatic decisions based on thresholds (financial or other) set. This predictive capability focuses on human intelligence and self-learning algorithms to predict potential problems, along with an impact analysis and generate alarms for upcoming events and smoothing out data anamolies or flagging them. Furthermore, it engages the user to 'act' or 'decide to avoid the potential problem.
  • Suggestions to prevent future problems: Predictive capability should focus on making suggestions to prevent issues from re-occurring and foster learning

Specific Requirements / Information (If Any)

• The linkage of data across the supply chain-related systems currently in use, including SAP ECC, SAP SRM, SAP IBP. SAP Transportation Management, SAP Ariba and non- SAP systems such as Electronic Fuel Management System (eFMS), Electronic Rations Management System (eRMS), Aviation Information Management Suite (AIMS), Contract Performance Reporting Tool (CPRT) and United Nations Global Market Place (UNGM) and others.
• Ability to link external data sources such as vendor and freight forwarder portals, other external sources customs data, weather data, shipment data commodity prices, container rates, carbon prices and regulatory and customer data, etc.
• Capture both structured and unstructured data, internal and external — to provide enhanced visibility for short- and midterm decision-making aligned with strategic organizational objectives.
• In each pillar, combine the five elements of people, process, data, organization, and supporting technologies.
• Each identified pillar/use case provides data, in the form of alerts, dashboards with visualization capabilities, collaborative processes, and workflows that enable supply chain managers to address issues as they surface.
• The system should bring the future into the present, leveraging real-time data and artificial intelligence to accurately predict the business risks and opportunities.
• The control tower should be intuitive and easier to navigate and act upon for quick decision-making.
• Data ingestion and harmonization across data sources
• Real time visibility of the performance across the business.
• Continuous monitoring of the business health.
• Insights to easily identify issues and risks in the business.
• Ability to make cross-functional analysis.
• Accessible on mobile devices
• Drill-downs and alerts capabilities

Application Closing Date
30th June, 2022.

Submission of Documents
Interested vendors/organizations should Click Here to express interest to this RFI electronically.

In case you have difficulties submitting your response electronically, please contact leekyung.shim@un.org directly for instructions.

Click Here (PDF) for more clarifications on the RFI.