ACA Pacific wins $4 million in Census deals

ACA Pacific has been handed contracts valued at almost $4 million with the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Two tender announcements, published this week, reveal ACA has been awarded one $2.6 million deal and one $1.2 million deal to support the delivery of the 2021 Census.

The larger contract is stated as being for 2021 Census paper data capture software, while the $1.2 million deal is for “scanning infrastructure” for the 2021 Census. Both deals are for two years, closing in June 2022.

The ABS confirmed with CRN it engaged ACA Pacific to provide scanning hardware and software for the 2021 census and ABS household and business surveys.

"The solution will scan and capture written responses on the Census and other ABS paper surveys, and turn them into electronic form. It also includes a repair functionality, which will improve the quality of scanned data," an ABS spokesperson said.

ACA, headquartered in Melbourne, specialises in data storage, document scanners and capture, and security solutions.

The distie touts itself as the leader in the field of scanning and capturing solutions, offering scanners, data capture and retrieval software, document recognition and linguistic software and electronic document management solutions.

"The ACA software and scanning infrastructure, which will be used by the Census Data Capture Centre, is expected to capture as many as three million paper forms," Soula Macfarlane, director of the 2021 Census Data Capture Centre, told CRN.

The ABS is planning a range of digital initiatives for the 2021 Census. The most significant of which is the digital service, which will include the online Census form, website and a range of self-service options such as the ability to order a paper form, the bureau said. 

The company has also chosen a delivery partner for its eCensus.

Earlier this year it was revealed by iTnews that the ABS had selected PwC to build the online platform for the next eCensus on Amazon Web Services.

That appointment represents a significant break in tradition for the agency that had relied on IBM to provide the online component of the survey until the high-profile 2016 eCensus debacle.

The now infamous #Censusfail event resulted in the electronic survey being initially knocked out by a series of DDoS attacks and then kept offline due to a series of behind-the-scenes failures.