<<Back to Article National Association of Government Contractors www.governmentcontractors.org GSA plans to standardize schedules Jun 16, 2008 The General Services Administration has announced a plan to set up a new office to standardize policy and procedures affecting its federal supply schedule contracts, a senior official said Monday. The Multiple Award Schedule Program Office, expected to open by August, is needed to present one voice to the vendors that sell products and services on GSA’s schedules and to the customer agencies that buy from the schedules, said Steve Kempf, acting assistant commissioner for acquisition management. Three offices within GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service — Integrated Technology Services Office, General Supplies and Services Office, and Travel, Motor Vehicle and Card Services Office — handle federal supply schedule sales. The Multiple Award Schedules is the name GSA gives its federal supply schedules program. The new GSA office will not set policy for the federal supply schedule contracts program run by the Veterans Affairs Department. “The longer we have the program in separate offices, the more opportunity there will be to take divergent paths in procedures and policy,” Kempf said following a meeting of the Multiple Awards Schedule Advisory Panel. The idea for a common program office to set the schedule’s ground rules has been in the works since GSA stood up FAS in 2007, he said. Earlier this month, the Coalition for Government Procurement, which represents many GSA schedule vendors, sent a letter to FAS Commissioner Jim Williams urging him to adopt the long-discussed office. A common program office will help speed up the award, modification and renewal process for GSA schedules, the coalition letter said. The new office would also maintain GSA’s various electronic tools for schedules changes and purchases, Kempf said. In addition to establishing a program office this year, the schedules’ modification process will also be altered, Kempf said. In November, GSA will roll out a new rapid addition process that will allow vendors to swap a new version of a product for an old version under the contract’s existing terms and conditions without the cumbersome reviews that usually slows such a modification, Kempf said. This would not apply to new products that were not part of the contract’s original negotiations, he said. For example, under the rapid addition process, a paper company can replace standard paper with recycled paper without having to renegotiate the line item, but if it wants to expand its paper business to copiers, it would have to go through the traditional modification process. GSA also plans to add modification intake desks at schedule centers to monitor the time it takes to modify a contract, Kempf said. The two modification changes will wait until the new fiscal year so contracting officers can be trained on the new processes without interfering with the end-of-year buying bonanza that usually hits GSA in September as departments rush to spend their funds before they expire, he said. Article URL: http://www.governmentcontractors.org/articles/a.584.asp © Copyright 2005-2008 The National Association of Government Contractors