IDIQ | The Contracting Education Academy

May 6, 2020 By cs

Job order contracting: The Army’s own IDIQ procurement solution

Indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts have been used by the United States Armed Forces as a standard form of construction procurement for nearly a half century.

IDIQ contracts deliver both flexibility and cost by allowing owners to complete an unlimited number of construction projects under a single, longstanding contract rather than needing to take each individual project to bid. There are several types of IDIQ contracts, but one particularly effective method is Job Order Contracting (JOC), also referred to as a SATOC (Single Award Task Order Contract).

Originally created by the Army Corps of Engineers, JOC is now utilized by all levels of government. JOC’s popularity and success is due to its process design, which emphasizes collaboration, continuous improvement and LEAN principles. Every JOC program is based on a Unit Price Book, which provides preset prices to any tasks needed to complete projects detailed in the Scope of Work. Owners can order any job or task listed in the Unit Price Book from the awarded contractor without having to take an individual project through a bid process, since tasks are priced in advance.

Ken Davis helped implement the JOC program at Fort Stewart during his 38 years of service to the U.S. Army. Davis emphasized time saving as one of the advantages of Job Order Contracting

“We were bidding on everything one at a time with individual, standalone contracts. We had to come up with specifications for every single contract or task order. JOC allowed us to begin projects in about half the time it took to do a standalone contract.”

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/federal-insights/2020/04/job-order-contracting-the-armys-own-idiq-procurement-solution/

July 18, 2019 By AMK

2019 NDAA analysis: Enhancing IDIQs and other provisions

Over the past several months, this blog has analyzed several key provisions of the Fiscal Year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that impact government contractors. This post briefly summarizes a variety of other government contracts-related provisions of the FY 2019 NDAA that we have not yet discussed, including several that reflect a congressional intent to enhance the use of multiple-award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contracts and encourage commercial item contracting, several that concern subcontracting and supply-chain considerations, and assorted other issues.

Awarding IDIQ Contracts Without Considering Price to Increase Order-Level Competition.

Section 876 provides a limited exception to the general requirement in 41 U.S.C. § 3306 that agencies must include cost or price to the government as an evaluation factor in evaluating proposals. The exception applies to task-order contracts (i.e., IDIQ contracts) for services that are priced on the basis of hourly rates. Specifically, agencies need not consider price as an evaluation factor for such contracts if:

the agency will award a base contract to every “qualifying offeror”—meaning a responsible source whose proposal conforms to solicitation requirements, meets all technical requirements, and is otherwise eligible for award; and
the agency will consider cost or price to the government in competitions for individual task orders.

This provision applies to non-defense agencies. Defense agencies had previously been granted a similar exception in the FY 2017 NDAA. See 10 U.S.C. § 2305(a)(3)(C).

Congress’s goal, as evidenced by the title to section 876, is “Increasing Competition at the Task Order Level.” By awarding base IDIQ contracts to all compliant proposals, without discriminating between them based on price, agencies are likely to have more contract-holders available to compete for specific work at the task-order level. Use of this mechanism should reduce an important barrier to entry to many potential competitors—not holding the necessary IDIQ contract to compete for work solicited under task order solicitations—and, by increasing competition, could result in lower pricing and better technical offerings at the task order level.

Keep reading article at: http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=810088

June 4, 2019 By AMK

Can contracts be awarded without pricing?

Since the enactment of the Competition in Contracting Act in 1984, price has been an essential element of every contract awarded by the Federal Government under the Federal Acquisition Regulation, along with technical capability and (more recently) past performance. In addition, before making an award, every contracting officer must determine that the price offered by the winning offeror(s) is “fair and reasonable.”

Agencies have wide discretion in establishing the value of the factors and subfactors under each of these three elements, and frequently price is identified as the least important of the factors to be evaluated.

But what if the price on a solicitation was not a factor to be evaluated at all? As part of the Professional Services Council’s long-standing acquisition reform advocacy agenda, we supported just such an experiment and it is now in effect for some agencies.

In Section 825 of the Fiscal Year 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Congress provided that, for multiple-award indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) contracts, DoD, NASA and Coast Guard buying activities are not required to evaluate cost or price during the evaluation of the formation of the ID/IQ contract, provided other conditions are met. If cost or price is not evaluated at formation, however, cost or price must be an evaluation factor in conjunction with the issuance of any task or delivery order under such awarded contract. The Professional Services Council strongly supported that legislative proposal.

What all of these ID/IQ solicitations and resulting contracts have in common is that there is actually no work associated with the formation of the base contract. All of the actual work is solicited under task or delivery orders issued once the base contract is in place. As such, we argued that agencies were creating irrelevant price evaluation factors in order to comply with the then-existing statutory requirement to evaluate price at contract formation, and agencies were not making true comparative evaluations of offerors’ pricing since there was no factual basis for doing so. And it didn’t matter whether the ID/IQ contract provided for fixed prices, labor hour pricing, or hybrid pricing.

Keep reading article at: https://www.pscouncil.org/a/Content/2019/Can_Contracts_Be_Awarded_Without_Pricing.aspx

May 17, 2018 By AMK

Officials mishandled trans-Africa airlift contract, Pentagon watchdog finds

Just days after the Pentagon released a post-mortem on a fatal ambush of U.S. combat troops in Niger last year, the department’s watchdog criticized U.S. Africa Command for mishandling a contract for conducting emergency evacuation services and airlifting cargo across the continent.

Defense Department rules required the command to conduct what is called a Service Requirements Review Board to analyze and verify its requirements before U.S. Transportation Command awarded a $900 million contract for trans-Africa airlift support.

The command’s contracting staff “did not take responsibility as the requiring activity” for the contract, with Transportation Command officials assuming that as long as they received funding and a performance work statement, “the requiring activity had validated the requirements,” said the report dated May 8.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.govexec.com/defense/2018/05/officials-mishandled-trans-africa-airlift-contract-pentagon-watchdog-finds/148229

March 7, 2018 By AMK

GSA says rule change will simplify Schedule buys, reduce proliferation of multiple-award contracts

The General Services Administration believes it’s fixed at least one of the reasons behind a proliferation of overlapping indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) multiple award contracts across the government.

Until now, there was no way for agencies to buy products and services from GSA’s Schedules program while simultaneously getting the ancillary services and goods they might need to actually make use of them.

A change to the General Services Administration Acquisition Regulation (GSAR), published last month, lets agencies buy what are known as “order level materials” (OLMs) via the schedules themselves. Previously, officials said, acquisition often had to undertake two contracting actions if they wanted to buy ancillary services from the schedules.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsradio.com/acquisition-policy/2018/02/gsa-says-rule-change-will-simplify-schedule-buys-reduce-proliferation-of-multiple-award-contracts/

Indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts have been used by the United States Armed Forces as a standard form of construction procurement for nearly a half century.

Awarding IDIQ Contracts Without Considering Price to Increase Order-Level Competition.

Just days after the Pentagon released a post-mortem on a fatal ambush of U.S. combat troops in Niger last year, the department’s watchdog criticized U.S. Africa Command for mishandling a contract for conducting emergency evacuation services and airlifting cargo across the continent.

The General Services Administration believes it’s fixed at least one of the reasons behind a proliferation of overlapping indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) multiple award contracts across the government.

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