On his first day in office, President Obama challenged leaders in government to "use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector." The acquisition process represents one of the most important areas of collaboration between government and the private sector.
Unfortunately, it is also among the most complex and least transparent. The Better Buy Project is an experiment dedicated to the belief that there's a lot of room for improvement in the way government buys products and services. We're testing this hypothesis by asking for your ideas on how to make acquisition process more open, transparent and collaborative.
The best part of this project is that the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) GSA would really like to adopt some of your best ideas. Promising ideas will be selected by GSA to be piloted on an upcoming acquisition, where lessons learned will be captured for future implementation. But that really depends on us, and the ideas we're able to produce.
This project is concerned primarily with the pre-contract-award stages of the acquisition process—the activities that take place before the government "signs on the dotted line" to buy a product or service. Those areas are:
The ultimate goal is to improve how government learns about and chooses what it buys—in other words, to make government a more informed, more effective consumer.
We are looking for ideas to make federal acquisition more open, transparent, and collaborative. What does that mean?
We believe that making the process more open, transparent and collaborative will make government more likely to end up with the right item at the right price.
This online forum allows you the opportunity to post comments and other information that will remain publicly viewable on this website. The site therefore operates a moderation policy to ensure that comments are appropriate and not harmful to others. Comments which include any of the following may be deleted by site administrators:
Additionally, while we invite open participation and diverse viewpoints to be shared, moderators reserve the right to remove posts which do not address some aspect of the stated purpose of this forum: To collect ideas about using collaboration and social media to improve the acquisition process. We deeply value your time and input, and our desire is to remove as few posts as possible while ensuring that a focused, constructive discussion takes place.
Finally, in addition to this policy, this site allows individual users to flag ideas as being spam, duplicate, or otherwise inappropriate. When an idea is flagged a sufficient number of times, it is automatically placed into a queue for review by moderators. We reserve the right to remove any posting that receives a sufficient number of "flags" to be placed in this queue, though will not automatically do so.
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Ravi Bhave
Please clarify – let’s take GSA for example – would something like this be in addition to eBuy? I know GSA has a vendor portal called VSC already for vendors to get info or transact mass mods. How do we think something like is suggested work with what GSA has?
Ravi Bhave
shared this idea and gave it 2 votes
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Peter, ebuy is generally for simplified acquitions over $100,000 and not for small value bids between $10,000 and $25,000. RFQ's on Ebuy require past performance as a major criteria. Mostly any federal buyer needs to have federal related past performance for bidding on these RFQ's so new entrants in the federal business who have GSA as a contract vehicle are generally not considered favorably for these bids. Since GSA is a contract vehicle where the buyer can buy of VSC list or GSA Advantage but there are over 5000 entrants in the schedule 70 area making it virtually impossible for the contracting officer to use VSC for a fair buy. My suggestion is for smaller buys if the contracting officer can use the social media sites and post those bids it will give a fair chance for the new entrants to bid on the same. As of today these small bids are hidden. Two examples of such bids are one which I dug from the DOI website for fisheries web development contract and the second example is my communications with HSRS small business officer where she tells me such small bids are posted on bill board in Rockville MD office making it virtually impossible for people not physically staying in these states. The major idea of doing smaller projects is then these projects can be added by new entrants on there future bids as there past performances. In today world social media sites if integrated properly will give a fair share of small businesses to many people.