The Houses of Parliament wants to move to the cloud.

Well, move its Retail Management System (RMS) at least.

One reason? It’s planning “pop-up” stores and wants to be able to pop them up fast.

(Parliament’s gift shop includes offerings like a 60-centimetre-high “LEGO interpretation of Big Ben”. The system will also underpin internal procurement needs).

A full contract notice is set to be published just ahead of the Christmas period on December 20, Parliament said, as it seeks to modernise its back-office infrastructure.

The Corporate Officers of the House of Lords and the House of Commons meanwhile say in a public notice that they need a “a resilient system which can handle and resolve both business and technical issues in a user-friendly manner”.

Computer Business Review was unable to reach either corporate office for more details.

parliament cloudParliament Cloud Retail System Needs to be “User Friendly”

The winner will need to provide a solution that can help manage stock suppliers, provide real-time inventory management and goods receipting (GRN) and support payments (cash, credit/debit card, PayPal, modern payment methods e.g., apple pay), the notice said.

It will need to handle product management (including detailed database/catalogue, multimedia support), reporting and management dashboards, business driven Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and come with minimal hardware peripherals, along with having a quick turn-around for setting up pop-up stores.

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The solution will need to include the “ability to handle and deliver complex promotions technical capabilities; an end to end integrated RMS system, a cloud based managed system, PCI compliance, single sign-on for back office users, API/Web Services for data integration (finance, sales and stock data)” and more.

Parliament UK added: “The scope of this project is to replace both hardware and software and to provide a modern and future ready end to end integrated managed solution. Success criteria The RMS solution must integrate seamlessly with our financial system (Agresso) and online webstore (Shopify).

Traceability of user activity on the parliament cloud system and the ability to ensure remote working will also be crucial.