“For the Department of Health and Human Services, spending a higher percentage of its $40 billion procurement budget through governmentwide acquisition contracts isn’t just a matter of convenience.
It’s the way HHS will get a better and deeper view into where components are spending their fiscal 2021 procurement budget. The greater use of GWACs and other governmentwide multiple award contracts—known as ‘best-in-class’ contracts—is how HHS will accelerate its use of data to drive spending decisions under the category management initiative.
Katrina Brisbon, associate deputy assistant secretary for acquisitions at HHS, said the agency hasn’t been an early adopter of category management.
‘We are taking a fresh look at what our spend is. We have a very small cell of individuals who are doing this so a lot of this is driven by resources. I’m happy to say most recently, we have gotten authorization to get an additional team and we will be bringing a team on, we hope, in the early part of the fiscal year to broaden out our category management oversight and engagement more broadly,’ Brisbon said during the Procurement Trends conference sponsored by the Professional Services Council. ‘We are at about 20% of where our goals are for the fiscal year [for spend under management]. We are looking to meet those goals, but we have a ways to go. But more importantly, we are working toward it by targeting more and more GWACs on our spend so that we can indeed ensure that HHS is joining the rest of government to ensure we are getting better buying power across our spend.’…”
“The Alliance for Digital Innovation, an industry association, is proposing changes to the GWAC model to bring it into the 21st Century.
‘There’s really some issues here that we can highlight and help address and ways that we can talk about it in a positive reform-minded process where we can actually help early and often chart a course for how the Biden administration can leverage the power and the breadth of the GWACs, to drive a lot of the build back better agenda and to really help agencies get the products and services that they want,’ said Matt Cornelius, the executive editor of the Alliance for Digital Innovation, in an interview with Federal News Network. ‘At the end of the day, the GWAC process and the acquisition process should be about ensuring that buyers have access to the best products and services available, and that their customers, the American citizens, get the highest satisfaction when they engage with the government.’…” Read the full article here.
Source: The underlying process for GWACs hasn’t changed since 1994; ADI says it’s time – By Jason Miller, June 23, 2021. Federal News Network.
