Crown Commercial Service (CCS) has published a tender for its Software Design and Implementation Services framework, which will allow organisations to buy support to introduce or upgrade back office software.

The framework will last for 30 months from March 2021 to September 2023 with CCS having the option to extend it for a further 18 months. It is valued at up to £1.5bn, compared with just £100m in the prior information notice for the framework published in May, although this was an indicative value covering just two years.

The framework will allow any UK public sector body to buy support from specialist suppliers, either to introduce a new cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or to upgrade legacy IT software. During its market engagement work for the tender, CCS said that as well as ERP it was also including human resources, payroll and other ‘back office’ systems including customer relationship and supply chain management software.

The tender notice says the framework will cover strategy, architecture, design, software selection, impact assessment, implementation, integration services, data migration, change management, training, on-boarding and business process automation, all within a single lot. CCS requires bids by 10 December and plans to award places on the framework on 26 February.

Last week saw CCS publish a tender for its Technology Services 3 framework worth up to £2bn over four years, including a £580m lot for major services transformation programmes.