2. Procurement Rules and Practices
Not to be derogatory but the government needs to hire more
(knowledgeable) buyers and contracting officers and engineers. This has a big impact on delays and delivery schedule.
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
The Federal Government is always interested to implement activities which are "Best Practices" in the Private Sector. I would like to suggest that one of these "Best Practices" is the Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA). In the Private Sector, whenever a new policy is being considered, a CBA is performed to evaluate whether to proceed with the new policy. Unfortunately, a CBA was never performed for the Federal Strategic Sourcing ...more »
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
The FAR currently contemplates two solutions to resolve the impact of corporate acquisitions and/or reorganization on federal contractors under the Anti-Assignment Act: the Novation process and a Name Change agreement. We propose that a third avenue be established to address situations in which, due to internal restructuring, the legal entity has changed but the parent company remains the same. In these instances, ...more »
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
Protests are expensive for industry to process and for the government to defend against. The government can reduce the likelihood of protests and improve the effectiveness of the procurement process by providing training to officials involved in solicitation preparation, proposal evaluation, and source selection on lessons already learned. For example, GAO’s Bid Protest Annual Report to Congress for FY2013 noted that ...more »
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
Despite a growing body of evidence that fixating on costs actually increases them, acquisition personnel insist on making every transaction cost-based. Sections 2379 and 2306a(d) of Title 10, USC, for instance, provide limited authority to obtain cost and pricing information for major weapons systems and their component parts where certified cost data are not required. This authority is over-applied in practice and ...more »
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
In addition to requiring a pre solicitation phase in all procurements over a certain threshold to be determined by Agency Contracting Head, I would recommend a more involved use of performance based acquisition practices for initial strategy adoption and O&M efforts in information technology. This includes the occasional coupling with incentive based contracting where appropriate. When these parts of the FAR are used ...more »
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
There is no reason for proposal instructions to not match evaluation criteria, which happens more often than not. This should be a required quality check for any procurement, as it will facilitate the proposal writing and the proposal evaluation process. This simple requirement will result in time and cost savings across the board.
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
See attached document for details.
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
The FAR should reflect best practices in the private sector and many state construction (15 or so) programs by requiring prime contractors to list/name primary subcontractors in low-price award procedures (like proposed in HR 1942). Since the 1984 Competition in Contracting Act, federal agencies have run away from construction project low-bid prime contract award procedures because of the claims and disputes that were ...more »
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
Attached is a statement by a company that has done business on federal contracts making the point that it is hard to compete against vendors who cut corners on wages and other required standards.
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
Notwithstanding the OFPP Act's intent to create a thoughtful,disciplined, and limited regulatory system, Federal agencies have increasingly ignored the system's requirements and proliferated duplicative, conflicting, unnecessary, and ill-designed local requirements that greatly frustrate the contracting community. Most disturbing is the rampant failure to: 1) follow statutory requirements for publicizing and obtaining ...more »
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
Contracting officers and specialists spend days each year going through proposal spreadsheets, correcting unintentional errors, and performing price analyses, cost analyses, and cost realism analyses. Technologically, the US is easily at the point where offerors can log into a single, web-based application and key in their data in designated fields. The fields automatically catch adding errors and rounding errors, which ...more »