Multiple Award Contract | The Contracting Education Academy

December 3, 2018 By cs

GSA will rollout schedules reform plan through fiscal 2020

The General Services Administration’s sweeping plan to consolidate 24 acquisition schedules into a single vehicle will play out over the next two years and will offer contractors a standard set of terms and conditions, officials said in a conference call last week.

GSA administrator Emily Murphy said the plan, which will condense the agency’s Multiple Award Schedules program into a single portal offering products and services contracts, represents a fortunate confluence of timing to potentially streamline the federal acquisition process.

“I’m excited we finally have the technology, timing and opportunity to enact meaningful reform,” she said.

GSA plans to roll out the reform plan in phases between now and fiscal 2020, starting with standing up a new schedule through which the agency plans to eventually on-board approximately 17,000 contracts.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.fedscoop.com/gsa-will-rollout-schedules-reform-plan-fiscal-2020/

November 15, 2018 By cs

GAO reiterates that agencies must meaningfully consider price in ‘best value’ tradeoffs

In three related bid protest decisions made public in the last few weeks, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reaffirmed the principle that agencies must meaningfully consider price when making best value tradeoff decisions.

GAO sustained the protests, stressing that merely paying lip service to price while selecting a more expensive, higher-rated offeror is not sufficient — agencies must provide a rational explanation for why they have decided to pay a premium for the awardee’s technical superiority.

In Solers, Inc., B-414672.3 et al.; Technatomy Corporation, B-414672.5; and OGSystems, LLC, B-414672.6 et al., three disappointed offerors challenged the Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) award of Multiple Award Task Order contracts to 14 contractors as part of the Systems Engineering, Technology, and Innovation program.

The solicitation provided that DISA would make award on a best-value tradeoff basis considering price and four technical factors that, when combined, were significantly more important than price. The agency made award to the 14 highest rated proposals in the non-price factors, opining — without elaboration — that “the technical merit of those proposals justifies paying a price premium over lower-rated, lower-priced proposals.” Indeed, throughout the evaluation process, the agency repeatedly noted — again without elaboration — that the awardees’ proposals were worth a premium.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.insidegovernmentcontracts.com/2018/11/hey-big-spender-gao-reiterates-that-agencies-must-meaningfully-consider-price-in-best-value-tradeoffs/

August 16, 2018 By cs

Changes are coming to professional services thanks to contract management

Changes are coming in the way the General Services Administration purchases services.

In April, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy released a new strategy to use category management to reduce multiple award contracts, and contractors will begin seeing the results soon.

“Services are procured very differently than commodities. What I’m focused on, and what senior leaders across government are focused on, in particular senior procurement executives, are we really need to move how we’re buying services to a performance-based environment,” said Tiffany Hixson, assistant commissioner of the Office of Professional and Human Capital Services within the Federal Acquisition Services at GSA. “We’ve been on this journey for many years. It really needs to be rebooted, and we’re going to continue to push in terms of how we buy services to being performance based. Buying engineers by the pound is not an effective way to deliver mission capabilities.”

During Deltek’s Spending Spree event July 19, Hixson said procurement officials need to focus on the outcome they want from a particular contract action, not necessarily the price. While there are some subcategories of professional services where price can be a driver, more often than not, officials should be looking at the value of the capability delivered.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsradio.com/acquisition/2018/07/changes-are-coming-to-professional-services-thanks-to-contract-management/

May 15, 2018 By cs

New OFPP strategy targets 13 percent reduction of duplicative contracts by 2020

The Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) has been trying to solve contract duplication for almost a decade.

OFPP required agencies to justify new multiple award contracts by submitting business cases. That had limited success.

OFPP tried to create catalogs of existing contracts so agencies could see what was out there first before going down the path of a new contract. That had even less success.

Now OFPP is trying to use category management and its subcategory best-in-class contracts to shrink the number of technology, professional services, transportation and logistics and seven other categories where the number of MACs has grown and grown for decades.

Each category manager developed new strategies for 2018 with goals across four broad areas. Without a doubt, reducing contract duplication and ensuring small businesses aren’t left behind are going to be the hardest to achieve.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsradio.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2018/04/new-ofpp-strategy-targets-13-percent-reduction-of-duplicative-contracts-by-2020

March 7, 2018 By cs

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/

The General Services Administration’s sweeping plan to consolidate 24 acquisition schedules into a single vehicle will play out over the next two years and will offer contractors a standard set of terms and conditions, officials said in a conference call last week.

In three related bid protest decisions made public in the last few weeks, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reaffirmed the principle that agencies must meaningfully consider price when making best value tradeoff decisions.

Changes are coming in the way the General Services Administration purchases services.

The Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) has been trying to solve contract duplication for almost a decade.

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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