Cutting requests for proposals from 1,000 pages to three was just a side benefit of a Hammer Award-winning cooperative effort between the Navy and the General Services Administration to revamp the way the Navy's Tactical Advanced Computer Project Office buys hardware.
The big benefits the Navy office reaped were in cost and time savings. The labor it takes the office to complete a competitive award was reduced from up to 40 people working 30 months to four people working three months. By switching from its own indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contracts to blanket purchase agreements (BPAs) available through GSA schedules, the Navy office will save $50 million, GSA said.
The team's plan represents "the simple, yet bold idea that federal purchasing could successfully mirror commercial buying practices," Acting GSA Administrator David Barram said Tuesday at the Hammer Award ceremony honoring the GSA/Navy collaboration. "It revolutionized the FSS [Federal Supply Service] schedule program by stripping away layers of regulations that are unique to the government and redesigning the order process to reflect marketplace thinking."
The Navy blanket agreement has become a key feature in a campaign by GSA to sell agencies on BPAs. GSA's blanket purchase agreements eliminate the need for repetitive individual purchases and associated time swallowers like searching for vendors, issuing solicitations and evaluating competing offers. A company or group of companies competitively bids for a BPA with GSA's Federal Supply Service. All an agency has to do to buy a set of products is pick a company on the BPA and negotiate a price. The future is looking bright for the Federal Supply Service, which charges agencies an administrative fee for using its schedules.
Elaine Spector, procurement director in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, sent a March 6 memo throughout DoD, stating that FSS schedule contracts are the preferred sources of product supplies for the department because of features like BPAs.
The memo was a reissuance of a long-forgotten 1987 DoD-wide memo touting the FSS schedules. Apparently, some DoD procurement people had never heard of the 1987 memo, so Spector decided to remind everyone of the department's official preference for GSA schedule contracts over agency-specific IDIQ contracts.
"Use of these contracts meets DoD goals to simplify the acquisition process while at the same time increasing the contracting officer's authority and ability to make sound business judgments," Spector wrote.
The potential for huge purchases using BPAs, and subsequently their increased appeal to DoD, has been heightened by the removal of any dollar limitations on BPA purchases. That means BPAs can be used to further reduce the price of products because larger scale purchases can be negotiated.
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