Vendors worried about OASIS Angst about GSA mega-contract for professional services
The Obama Administration’s push for strategic bulk buying is about to expand to cover billions of dollars in professional services with the goal of better management to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
But vendors have become increasingly agitated by the plans because they fear that high-level technical and management support may be oversimplified in the process, possibly driving down performance as well as prices.
The General Services Administration is preparing to release a draft Request for Proposals in a month or so for OASIS (One Aquisition Solution for Integrated Services), a governmentwide multiple-award contract, valued at up to $60 billion over 10 years. OASIS will have two tracks: unrestricted and small-business only.
On Feb. 1, panelists from the GSA and vendor groups met to discuss critical questions about OASIS. Participants from the Professional Services Council, TechAmerica, ACT-IAC and the Coalition for Government Procurement asked what the GSA is expected to gain from OASIS, how it will handle pricing and pricing data, and how OASIS fits within broader strategic sourcing plans.
The goal of OASIS is to better manage the purchase of engineering, IT, management consulting and other services under a single contract, which currently is not possible, said Jeff Koses, director of GSA’s office of acquisition operations. Agencies generally create new contracts for each service they need. Under OASIS, there would be a single centralized contract all agencies can use. Presumably it would have standard prices or price ranges for various labor categories of professional services.
The government needs OASIS to reduce “repetitive” contracts, Koses said.
Currently, some vendors have up to 200 professional services contracts with the government, while some federal agencies have 20 or more services contracts with the same company, Koses said.
Prices for the same apparent service vary 200% to 400%, he added, and agencies appear to get no leverage from buying in bulk.
“It costs a lot to manage all that, so how do we reduce that?” Koses asked. “There is enormous savings potential.”
In OASIS, the GSA intends to collect data on pricing to allow for comparisons of prices for essentially the same level of services, he said.
But how do you determine the right price? Jim Ghiloni, GSA director of business operations, suggested honing in on a common vocabulary and definitions for specific labor categories, obtaining pricing data for each category and plotting it on graph. The pricing data for a particular service likely would resemble a Bell Curve, he said, with most prices falling in the middle and outliers at each end of the curve.
Making the pricing data widely available to contracting officers will enable smarter buying decisions, Ghiloni said. Vendors with prices at the high end “would have to justify their rates,” Ghiloni said.
Under OASIS, high-end vendors “would have to justify their rates,” Ghiloni said.
However, vendors at the meeting raised objections to OASIS and suggested it was too broad and oversimplified and potentially would have negative unintended consequences.
Trey Hodgkins, senior vice president at TechAmerica, said it was hard to conceptualize the standardization of the most complex procurements of services. “Strategic sourcing works for paper clips,” he said.
Roger Waldron, president of the coalition, said standardized labor rates for services are contradictory to the government’s push for excellence in performance-based contracts. In those deals, contractor pay is tied to getting the best results.
“This undermines the whole point of doing performance-based contracting,” Waldron said. Without a method to pay for superior skills, those skills may become less available, he suggested.
Stan Soloway suggested that GSA may be inadvertently raising the costs of contracting by seeking large amounts of new data. “Those costs should be articulated and reported,” he said. “Data is not a free good.”
Despite the concerns, Joe Jordan, administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, said contractors have to be prepared for strategic buying.
“Mandatory is what we’re moving toward,” Jordan said. “There will be winners and losers, and not all who want to sell to the government can sell to the government.”
Jordan hopes to apply strategic sourcing to about $150 billion in annual contracts.
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