GSA to link e-procurement pieces

By spring, the General Services Administration will begin to connect some of the pieces of the Integrated Acquisition Environment e-government project.Project manager Teresa Sorrenti said the integration eventually will encompass all the Quicksilver initiative components: the Business Partner Network, the Central Contractor Registration, the Intra Governmental Transactions Exchange, the Past Performance Information Retrieval System, the Federal Technical Data system and now the new Federal Procurement Data System.“We will be integrating some of the initial capabilities, but not all the pieces at once,” Sorrenti said today at the official launch of the new FPDS. “The project is about shared services, and FPDS is a piece of that vision.”FPDS went live Oct. 1 after nearly four years of planning . This is the first major redesign since the procurement system was developed in 1979, said David Bibb, acting GSA deputy administrator. In 1997, FPDS moved from a mainframe to a client-server environment, and it gained browser accessibility in 2000.Bibb said FPDS in its new form will save the government $10 million annually by discontinuing agency feeder systems, reducing data input time and improving accuracy.The project team is already working on FPDS enhancements such as the ability to search, create ad hoc reports and link directly to agency business systems, Sorrenti said.