GSA's draft acquisition system guidelines aim for standardization

The General Services Administration in April published a draft outlining standards for software that federal agencies use to write contracts, with the aim to streamline the acquisition process and provide better interoperability among contracting and financial systems.

Comment on this article in The Forum.To write contract and purchase orders, agencies use applications called Federal Acquisition Systems, which are often commercial software. The applications standardize the tasks of writing a contract proposal or request for information by automatically inserting language and clauses required by the Federal Acquisition Regulation. The process includes myriad rules and regulations contained in the FAR, which are highly prescribed and involve distinct courses of action based on the circumstances of the contract and the agency.

The contract-writing applications, developed by several software companies, typically are not compatible with each other or with financial management systems. By establishing a common set of guidelines, GSA hopes the contract-writing systems will be compatible with the financial management line of business, further automating the process from the point of the initial writing of the contract to the final action of payment to the contractor.

"It's much like passing information from one individual to another; it actually loses a degree of clarity unless it's passed the same way all along the life cycle," said Earl Warrington, director of the integrated acquisition environment for GSA's Office of the Chief Acquisition Officer. "Now we are going to start passing this data along a variety of back-office applications," which should ensure greater speed and accuracy.

Warrington said the greatest challenge to writing the draft was getting the technical requirements correct so contract-writing systems could "talk" to the federal financial system and the central contract writing system. Without such integration, agencies are forced to rely on employees manually re-entering information from one system into another, a process that can be both time-consuming and mistake prone.

Ray Bjorklund, senior vice president and chief knowledge officer for the federal consulting firm FedSources Inc. in McLean, Va., said the standards would reduce the need to repeatedly input the same information manually. "Every time you put a human in the process, there is the possibility that something could get" entered incorrectly, he said. "There are horror stories about federal procurement data because there are humans involved."

"If you are going to use a GSA Schedule for instance, you have to write the order a certain way, using certain clauses and conditions," Bjorklund said. "However, it's still a very complex process that requires a great deal of judgment and discretion on the part of the contracting officer or specialist."

Warrington said the guidelines also would allow contracting officers to share contract data more easily by standardizing the format and would provide greater accuracy and timeliness.

Working with members of the federal acquisition community, it took GSA more than two and a half years to write the first draft of the requirements, he said. The agency is accepting comments for the next 60 days, after which it will spend up to 120 days reviewing the comments. GSA will then release a second draft.