There are still plenty of wrinkles to be ironed out if the General Services Administration (GSA) wants to get the most out of its One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services (OASIS) next-generation contracting vehicle for complex professional services, according to the head of a leading Washington professional and technical services trade group.
GSA’s goal for OASIS is for it to become a one-stop shop for both commercial and non-commercial needs. OASIS is designed to reduce duplication of contracting efforts across the federal government, also known as strategic sourcing, and provide agencies with comprehensive, integrated professional services contract options.
Strategic sourcing allows the government to consolidate purchasing that agencies would normally perform individually to drive down prices. Professional services are occupations that provide a specialized task, like information technology or accountancy, to a business or federal agency. Integration capabilities are the ability to take a variety of functional skill sets and integrate them into a solution, Professional Services Council President Stan Soloway told Defense Daily last week.
Soloway said applying strategic sourcing methods to commodities like disks or laptops makes sense, but applying it to complex, higher-end professional services could backfire because focusing on achieving best value ignores what differentiates professional services from commodities, which is the quality and sophistication level of the services.
“So if the idea of OASIS is simply to get complex, high-end professional services at a strategically-sourced, or a volume discount basis, that’s not a very smart way to go buying things that actually have a lot of nuance and a lot of complexity to them,” Soloway said. “So we’re trying to distinguish what happens when you buy a commodity and what happens when you buy something more complex?”
After engaging with industry and professional services groups, it appears, according to Soloway, GSA has moved away from its initial OASIS idea of treating professional services as commodities, for which he credited the administration. But Soloway said in an April 29 letter to GSA’s OASIS chief James Ghiloni posted on PSC’s website there are still numerous fixes that should be implemented to help OASIS get the most bang for its buck.
Soloway recommended GSA:
* Revise the past performance evaluation criteria to more closely align the scoring for commercial sector past performance with the scoring for government sector past performance;
* Allow scoring for past performance evaluations for work performed by contractors on state and local government work to be equal to scoring values ascribed to federal work;
* Revise the CAS compliance requirement to provide that offerors who do not have CAS covered systems will not be excluded from the initial award phase but will be ineligible to compete for task orders that require such systems;
* Remove certain system, certification and resource requirements from the initial contract formation evaluation criteria and apply them at the task order level as needed;
* Inject flexibility by clarifying that a specific certification or an equivalent certification is acceptable; and
* Permit third-party audit approval of an acceptable accounting system for an offeror.
Soloway said GSA should align commercial sector performance with government sector performance because federal agencies already do this. It just takes market research and reference checking to verify the commercial sector performance. Soloway said this uneven scoring also trusts that government past performance databases are accurate or timely, which he said “nobody believes they are.”
Soloway also said presuming government experience as superior to commercial experience is faulty because large companies like Walmart [WMT] or Caterpillar [CAT] have performed complex integrations in the commercial space that have relevance on the government side.
“There are ways they can (validate commercial-side experience),” Soloway said. “It will require effort and the ability to do not only simple reference checks, but (have) due diligence. That is what they should be doing if they want to create the best and most viable contract vehicle around.”
Soloway said he’s unsure if defense contractors could benefit from OASIS more than other agency contractors because he doesn’t see OASIS being used to integrate weapons systems, even though some of the capabilities GSA is looking for are consistent with what goes into integrating a weapons system. Soloway said part of his concern with how GSA was judging performance histories could narrow the playing field to just a “handful” of folks who can demonstrate that they have done this complex work at the government level.
“We think the procurement is best served by having the most open aperture possible to give the maximum number of participants the opportunity,” Soloway said.
Soloway said he expects the final request for proposals (RFP) for OASIS to be out late this summer.