GSA Makes Pitch for Advantage, e-Buy GSA plans upgrades to the GSA Advantage and e-Buy online procurement systems in hopes of attracting more buyers and sellers, said Tina Burnette, deputy assistant commissioner of the Federal Supply Service. The online innovations have suffered from a classic chicken-egg problem: too few vendors to interest buyers and too few buyers to interest vendors. Advantage allows government buyers to order electronically from schedule vendors. E-buy allows buyers to e-mail requests for quotation automatically to all qualified schedule contractors. Burnette said GSA will improve Advantage’s search capabilities, “the number one source of customer dissatisfaction.” For example, one contractor described entering the search term “ergonomics,” looking for services providers, and receiving hundreds of listings for ergonomic furniture. Burnette said upgrades to e-Buy will include hyperlinks to contractors’ websites. E-Buy attracted just 13,000 postings in fiscal 2003, but GSA is hoping to triple that number this year, she said. She reminded vendors that e-Buy is especially useful to agencies at the end of the fiscal year, when they need to move fast to spend leftover funds. GSA schedule contractors must register with Advantage before they can sign up to receive RFQs by e-mail through e-Buy. The General Accounting Office reported last year that only about 12% of schedule contractors had posted their products and services on Advantage, even though the site has been in operation since 1995. Vendors told GAO auditors that it didn’t make sense to spend several thousand dollars to load an online catalog if buyers were not using the site. GAO said Advantage accounted for less than one-half of 1% of schedule sales through 2002. (SAA, 4/4/03) Speaking at a conference sponsored by the Coalition for Government Procurement July 28 in McLean, VA, Burnette also described the overhaul of GSA’s governmentwide acquisition contracts. Two existing GWACs, Answer and Millennia, along with several smaller ones, are being consolidated into a single new vehicle called Alliant. (SAA, 1/23) With a ceiling of $150 billion over 15 years, Burnette said Alliant will be “the largest vehicle the government has ever used.” She said the exact number of awards has not been settled. Preliminary planning calls for 15 awards to large businesses and five to coalitions of small businesses. GSA officials have said each contractor will be required to provide a full range of IT solutions, so small firms will likely have to form teams to qualify. Industry days for the Alliant contract are set for Feb. 18 in Oakland, CA, and March 29 in Washington. Burnette also revealed that GSA is considering establishing a GWAC set aside for businesses owned by service-disabled veterans, to provide a vehicle for agencies to meet the 3% goal for contracting with those companies. The government has never achieved even one-half of 1% of its purchases from service-disabled vets. Burnette said no final decision on the issue has been made, but she pointed to the success of other set-aside GWACs, including the FAST contract for 8(a) firms, GSA’s HUBZone GWAC and the Commerce Department’s COMMITS for small businesses.