Submitted By
Steve Drazner, Chief Financial Officer, and Ahmad Zayyad, Deputy Village Manager
Reviewed By
AMZ
Agenda Item Title
Title
A Resolution Approving a Purchase and Support Services Agreement with DynaTouch Corporation for an Indoor Kiosk for a Three-Year Period for a Total Not to Exceed Amount of $67,000, Authorizing its Execution and Waiving the Village’s Bid Process for the Purchase
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Overview
Overview
In an effort to reduce the volume of unnecessary person-to-person transactions, staff is recommending the purchase of an indoor kiosk at Village Hall. This kiosk would be placed in the Police Station lobby for utmost security and customers would thus have 24/7 access to the service.
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Recommendation
Recommendation
Approve the Resolution.
Fiscal Impact
The cost associated with the purchase of equipment and implementation as well as the annual support costs in years 2 and 3 of the agreement would be $51,682. In addition, the requested not-to-exceed purchase amount also includes an estimated $15,000 to integrate the Passport application (i.e. vehicle stickers, citations, parking permits) which is not included in the fixed cost portion of the proposal due to vendor uncertainty regarding the number of programming hours to accomplish this additional task. A budget amendment for the $67,000 will be necessary for FY21 and has been included in the Q2 budget amendment ordinance.
Background
While Village Staff encourages customers to pay online whenever possible, there is a segment of the population that do not feel comfortable with online payments or do not have secure computer or internet access and prefers to pay in person at Village Hall. In connection with this, it is desirous to reduce person-to-person transactions and automate in-person payments as much as possible.
As this is a very customized purchase/project with a limited number of vendors that offer this type of equipment and service, although this cannot be justified as a “sole source” purchase, staff concluded that it would be in the Village’s best interest and most efficient to identify what appear to be the three most qualified vendors based on upfront, extensive research and then conduct several meetings with each one to determine if any or all of them could meet the Village’s needs in a cost-effective manner.
Staff from Finance, VMO, and IT met remotely with each of the following three identified potential vendors to obtain a clear understanding of what each could provide:
1) Kiosk Prepaid
2) CityBase
3) DynaTouch (DT) Corporation
The staff recommendation to select DT is based on the following justifications:
1) Kiosk Prepaid (KP) provides the ticket to cash kiosks most often found in large casinos. While this company is excellent in what it does for this specific industry, KP, unfortunately, has very limited to no experience serving municipal customers.
2) CityBase is the kiosk vendor used by the City of Chicago as well as some other mid to large-sized municipalities throughout the country. However, the software that they use to operate their kiosks would need to be completely customized in order to be compatible and interface with the applications (Cityview, BS&A, and Passport) used by the Village of Oak Park.
3) The third vendor and the one recommended is DynaTouch (DT). This vendor was referred by the Village’s online payment provider, Invoice Cloud. DynaTouch and Cityview are subsidiaries of the parent corporation, Harris Computer Corporation while Invoice Cloud is in a partnership with Harris. As such, Invoice Cloud and Cityview are most compatible with DT kiosk technology compared to other kiosk vendors and this will greatly simplify and reduce the amount of time and effort needed to interface a DT kiosk with those applications. However, it is important to note that the Passport application (used for vehicle stickers, parking permits, and adjudication citations) is not compatible with DT, and thus interfacing Passport with the DT kiosk would come at an additional cost as described in greater detail below.
DT quoted the Village a total of $51,682 for one indoor kiosk (an outdoor kiosk is slightly more expensive). This includes the cost of the equipment, configuration/customization, implementation, and annual support fees for years 2 and 3. However, the vendor will charge an additional fee to integrate the kiosk with the Passport application at an estimated cost of $15,000, determined by actual programming hours.
Finally, please realize that the kiosk will not be able to handle all kinds of transactions, particularly those involved with citations, parking permits, vehicles stickers, animal licenses, and real estate transfer stamps. The longer-term objective will be to have the kiosk programmed to accept nearly all types of transactions but this will take time and as of now, an undetermined amount of money. As such, once the kiosk is set up and operating, it is expected to reduce foot traffic to the cashier window by 50-75%.
Alternatives
Not approve the purchase and operate under the existing model.
Previous Board Action
None
Citizen Advisory Commission Action
N/A
Anticipated Future Actions/Commitments
N/A
Intergovernmental Cooperation Opportunities
N/A