“Next month, the reporting function of a key federal contracting data tool will be retired as officials push users toward a new tool on a new site destined to become the central hub for all government contracting.”
“Moving the reporting functions of the Federal Procurement Data System—and other parts of the larger transition—has led to widespread frustration and confusion among contracting officers and vendors alike. The program office managing the transition is hoping to quell these issues for future rollouts and through improved training sessions for users.”
“The General Services Administration is in the midst of an ambitious plan to consolidate every federal contracting tool—vendor registration, solicitations, contracts databases, past performance information, wage rates—on a single website.”
“The final site will be called SAM.gov—named for the System for Awards Management—but it won’t be the same as the current SAM.gov, where federal contractors go to register their companies before being allowed to bid on solicitations. The original SAM.gov is still live while the Integrated Award Environment, or IAE, team at GSA moves functionality for that and other tools to the beta.SAM.gov website.”
“’A branding specialist would say, ‘What were you thinking?’’ Judith Zawatsky, assistant commissioner for the office of systems management in the Federal Acquisition Service, said of the confusion caused by operating both sites at once. ‘The real reason has to do with regulations and it’s a very simple and kind of nerdy answer: These functionalities are called out in regulation and they are called out by certain names…’” Read the full article here.
Source: How and When GSA’s New Central Contracting Portal Will Lose the ‘Beta’ – By Aaron Boyd, September 11, 2020. Nextgov.
