Financial accounting and management solution for VR Group/ Invitation to participate

VR-Yhtymä Oyj / VR-Group Plc (hereinafter also "VR" or "contracting entity") is starting a public tendering process to procure, implement and support modern cloud-based financial and management accounting solution. The solution will replace two separate SAP ECC systems currently in use in Finland and Sweden. The procured solution contains capabilities for at least, but not limited to, following areas: - general ledger accounting - accounts payable - accounts receivable - service fee/manual invoicing - fixed asset accounting incl. right-of-use assets - month/year-end closing - financial reporting and reporting to authorities - calculation capabilities for tax reporting covering Finland and Sweden - cost and profit accounting - integration capabilities from/to 3rd party systems - capability to provide data to data platform and/or 3rd party analytics tools Furthermore, the system needs to be able to create invoices with or without sales order based on data from external sales systems and send invoicing data forward in electronical format. Finance and operational planning, consolidation and group reporting is done in separate system. Treasury operations, e.g. hedging, liquidity forecasting and loan management is done in a separate system. Procurement and supplier invoice management is done in a separate system. Finance solution to be procured must be integrated with other finance systems. The solution needs to cover operations in Finland, Sweden and Latvia and be easily extended to other countries, if necessary. VR is looking for a single product or products from the same product family as well as supplier who will implement the solution and provide solution for continuous support. The scope of the procurement will cover all these aspects. VR Group Plc has three main business units, which are VR Transpoint (Logistics), VR Long-distance traffic and VR City traffic. In addition, there is also a maintenance company (VR FleetCare). VR Group consists of around 15 legal entities in Finland, Sweden and Latvia and has over 9100 employees. This procurement is made for all legal entities under VR Group, i.e. VR-Group Plc and all its group companies. In Finland there are at the moment 12 relevant legal entities, in Sweden VR Sverige and VR Snabbtåg, and in Latvia VR Services Latvia SIA. In case new VR Group entities would be established, the procured solution must be possible to take into use in also such entities. The aim is that the procurement process would end in Q3/2025, when the implementation would start. We are planning a phased go live and the goal is to have the first legal entities with fully implemented system in place in H2/2026 with rollouts following. The schedule of the procurement may however change during the procurement procedure. VR is looking for partner, which has capacity to implement the system in the given target schedule and has expertise in similar implementation programs. Functional and non-functional requirements as well as system and integration architecture requirements will be provided later during the procurement procedure.

The procurement will be carried out by means of negotiated procedure. The Finnish Act on Procurements and Concession Contracts of Entities Operating in the Water and Energy Supply, Transport and Postal Services Sector 1398/2016 (later "Act on Public Contracts in the Utilities sector") applies to the procurement. A candidate must fulfil all suitability requirements set in the contract notice and its appendices in order to be qualified as a tenderer to the procurement procedure. Due to the need to manage the procurement process, the number of selected tenderers has been limited to 5. If more than 5 requests to participate are received from candidates fulfilling the suitability requirements, the number of candidates will have to be reduced. In this case, VR will compare the references provided by the candidates to the extent that they exceed the minimum requirements set for the references and as described in section "Grounds for decision" in the invitation to participate and Annex 1 Reference form. Suitability requirements are presented in the ESPD form (European Single Procurement Document) attached to the contract notice. All requirements for the procurement, as well as the contract terms, will be defined during the procurement procedure. All final requirements will be presented in the final invitation to tender.