GSA marketing to rebrand contracts as "solutions"

In an attempt to better respond to the needs of agency customers, the General Services Administration has refashioned its procurement offerings.

Starting earlier this year, GSA has stopped marketing its contracts as supply schedules, governmentwide acquisition contracts or network services contracts, and started rebranding its contracts as topical solutions, like furniture solutions, IT solutions or security solutions.

“We did a lot of customer interviews and customer satisfaction surveys and focus groups and asked, ‘How do you want us to deliver this to you?’ And the answer was clear, they’re looking for solutions,” said Gary Feit, assistant commissioner for customer accounts and research at GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service (FAS). “They don’t really care about the type of contract.”

The new approach helps GSA demonstrate that it is willing to craft a specific deal to meet agencies’ specific needs, Feit said.

GSA also got more aggressive in its outreach to customers by studying agencies’ budgets and procurement forecasts and pitching GSA solutions that could fit their requirements, Feit said. Through budgetary analysis, GSA is “starting to develop trends and building our solutions around those trends,” he said.

From its inception in 2007, FAS’s Integrated Technology Service has been marketing its IT schedule contracts, governmentwide acquisition contracts and network services contracts as a suite of IT solutions. During this time, IT schedule sales at GSA regained their footing. After falling $200 million in 2006 to $16.3 billion, IT sales rose to $16.4 billion in 2007.

“We’re able to speak with one voice to our customer about the myriad of products and services we offer through our portfolio and therein lies our strength,” said John Johnson, assistant FAS commissioner for Integrated Technology Services. “We’re looking at the best approach for them based on their unique circumstances.”

But the austere budget environment has hampered growth, Johnson said.

“The schedules do not represent an anomaly,” Johnson said. “You look across the board and you see a stabilization and a little bit of tightening of the belt.”

Similarly, non-IT contracts are getting a packaged treatment, said Joe Jeu, assistant FAS commissioner for General Supplies and Services. By consolidating all non-IT contracts under the General Supplies and Services banner, customers have a one-stop shop for things like furniture, transportation, security or other services, Jeu said. In this way, “we can truly design the best solution for our customer where before we were a little more stovepiped,” he said.

Professional and technical services, however, have maintained solid growth over the last three years. The Mission Oriented Business Integrated Services, Professional Engineering Services and Financial and Business Solutions account for three of the top five selling schedules in 2007.

FABS has seen rapid growth in the last year, selling nearly $1 billion in 2007, up from nearly $800 million in 2006. The popularity parallels increased attention to federal financial management and data security. FABS sells credit-monitoring services for agencies to use when citizen data goes missing, Jeu said.

More important than GSA marketing its contracts is faster procurement of products and services agencies want on those contracts, said Neal Fox, marketing consultant and former GSA commissioner who oversaw the supply schedules program.

“Adding products to the GSA programs is an onerous process for vendors, and it frustrates customers that they don’t add products more quickly than they do,” Fox said. GSA puts specific part and product numbers into contracts rather than general products descriptions, meaning every time an IT company adds a new printer, the contract must be modified before it can be sold to the government, Fox said.

GSA has not yet implemented a pilot program, Quick Mod, that would have solved this problem and given agencies the easy access to cutting-edge products, he said.
If the product is new, “GSA won’t create a new product category for a product the government doesn’t buy,” said Mark Amtower of Amtower & Co., a Highland, Md., government marketing consultant.

GSA is still studying ways to add to schedules faster, Williams said. GSA has also formed an advisory committee of 15 industry and agency procurement leaders to take a six-month look at the schedule’s regulations, structure and pricing to determine if improvements or changes are required.