TBIPS, in plain words

Task-Based Informatics Professional Services

What it gates

Task-based IT professional services for federal departments and agencies at or above the Canada–Korea Free Trade Agreement threshold for services - CA$100,000 from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2027, per Contracting Policy Notice 2025-8. A department that needs a business analyst, a developer or an IM/IT specialist for a defined piece of work with a start date, an end date and deliverables must buy it this way. Solutions-based informatics work at the same threshold goes through SBIPS, the other mandatory informatics vehicle; informatics work below the threshold goes through ProServices.

How it is divided

By stream, by category within each stream, by region, and by tier. Streams group related expertise; categories are the specific resource types you are claiming; regions decide where you can be called on; and the tier is contract size. Tier 1 covers requirements from $100,000 to $3,750,000 and may be run by the client department or by PSPC; Tier 2, above $3,750,000, is run by PSPC. You qualify for the streams, categories and regions you can evidence, and only those.

How you get on it

1. Decide which streams and categories your firm can actually evidence. This is the step firms rush, and it is the one that decides everything after it - every category claimed needs reference projects behind it.
2. Get the corporate house in order: legal name, CRA business number and SAP Business Network ID (the Procurement Business Number retired on 3 July 2026), three years in business, the revenue and cumulative-billing minimums the solicitation sets for your tier, insurance at the fixed minimums (commercial general liability of $2,000,000 among them), and a Designated Organization Screening. PSPC does not issue the arrangement without the screening, and a first one takes months, so it starts first.
3. Write the reference projects. Each has to demonstrate a specific claimed category in the terms the evaluation grid uses, not in the terms your firm uses internally.
4. Submit through the Centralized Professional Services System against the open Request for Supply Arrangements (EN578-170432). Submissions are evaluated on the published quarterly calendar - after the last business day of March, June, September and December - not as they arrive.
5. Work the deficiency cycle. Findings come back after evaluation, each with a window to answer, and the cycle is where most of the calendar goes.

When it reopens

Quarterly, on a published calendar. The Request for Supply Arrangements stays open - the current one runs to 4 July 2028 - and PSPC evaluates what has arrived by the last business day of each quarter. Miss a quarter and the next is three months away; nothing arrives on the tender feed to remind you, so the dates go in the diary.

Why firms get this wrong

The two mistakes are almost always the same, and neither is about capability.

Claiming too many categories. Every category needs reference projects that demonstrate it specifically. Ten categories with thin evidence fails where three with solid evidence would have passed, and the ten do not get you ten times the work.

Writing the reference projects in your own language. The evaluation grid has words in it. A project described as “modernised the client’s claims platform” may be exactly the work the category asks for and still score nothing, because the evaluator is matching against a list and yours does not contain the words on it.

What being on it does and does not do

Being qualified means you can be invited to bid. TBIPS requests for proposals go only to holders qualified in the tier, stream, categories and region the requirement names; a firm outside the arrangement does not lose those competitions, it never sees them. It does not mean you will be invited to all of them, and a firm that qualifies and then never bids has bought nothing.

It also does not stop at qualification. Categories change, the rate card sets a ceiling on what a day can bill, and a firm that qualified three years ago in categories it no longer sells in is carrying a piece of paper rather than an asset.

What we can see, and what we cannot

PSPC does not publish the list of TBIPS holders as a whole. It does publish each supply arrangement it awards, one record at a time, in the CanadaBuys contract-history dataset - a row titled “TBIPS SA – firm” with the date. So when a report of ours says your firm is absent from TBIPS, it means two things were checked: no arrangement award under TBIPS names your firm in that record, and no contract under any arrangement in the category names it either. The record begins in 2019; a firm qualified before that may not appear in it. If you already hold the arrangement, tell us and the report is wrong.