FPDS Reporting Tools Make Final Transition to beta.SAM
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By
Aaron Boyd
GSA shuttered the reporting functions on FPDS.gov, making the beta.SAM.gov Data Bank tool the definitive source for contract awards data.
On Saturday, the four reporting functions of the Federal Procurement Data System—the system of record for all federal contract awards—were closed down and fully transitioned to the Data Bank page on beta.SAM.gov, the General Services Administration-run website that will soon be a one-stop shop for federal acquisition tools.
GSA officials have been working to migrate a number of acquisition-focused websites and tools to beta.SAM, with the FPDS tools just the most recent effort. Previously, GSA moved Wage Determination Online, or WDOL, the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, or CFDA, and the government’s main contract opportunities site Federal Business Opportunities, better known as FedBizOpps or FBO.
While the rest of FPDS is slated to join beta.SAM in the future, Saturday’s transition covers the tools for running the four types of available reports: administrative, static, standard and ad hoc.
“The transition went smoothly over the weekend,” a GSA spokesperson told Nextgov. “We are seeing a steady level of usage, supporting a proportional number of simultaneous users as the old FPDS reports module,” with more than 7,500 reports run as of 3 p.m. Monday.
The spokesperson said the site hasn’t seen any performance issues but encouraged users to report any issues to the Federal Service Desk.
The FPDS reporting functions were initially scheduled to be fully transitioned this past spring. But after a tense migration of the FedBizOpps site in late 2019, GSA officials opted for a soft launch of the migrated reporting tool in March. The reporting tools lived on both sites for seven months until the FPDS.gov module was officially closed down Saturday.
“It gives us more time to bring people along, it gives us more time to create additional training materials; we heard a lot through those who have tested it; we’ve been able to make some tweaks to it, and particularly tweaks to the training material,” Judith Zawatsky, assistant commissioner for the office of systems management, said of the soft launch in a recent interview with Nextgov. “It’s very, very hard to get someone to pay attention to the fact that the functionality will be there, but how you use it changes.”