Roger Waldron of the Coalition for Government Procurement says the MAS Consolidation and Catalog Management is a common-sense vision can deliver innovative, bes...
This column was originally published on Roger Waldron’s blog at The Coalition for Government Procurement and was republished here with permission from the author.
On Dec. 12, 2018, the General Services Administration hosted the Federal Marketplace Industry Day, at which, GSA announced its public launch of its Federal Marketplace Strategy (FMS). As an invited speaker representing Coalition for Government Procurement members, I was honored to participate and contribute to the dialogue around GSA’s strategic initiatives to increase transparency, enhance competition, and deliver best value solutions to support customer agency missions.
Many of you may recall that the FMS is underpinned by four cornerstones:
Administrator Emily Murphy, in kicking off the Industry Day, highlighted what FMS means for GSA’s customer agencies and industry partners:
“For customer agencies, it means we are using data analytics to get actionable insights to make it easier to find and buy solutions on the Schedules. For vendors, it’ll make it easier to offer those solutions in a way that best fits their technology and the way their customers actually want to buy things.”
It is a powerful, common-sense vision that has the potential to deliver innovative, best value, commercial solutions to meet customer agency needs, and, as anyone can see, the MAS Consolidation and Catalog Management cornerstones are central to this vision. Coalition members appreciate GSA’s strong engagement with its industry partners on MAS Consolidation and Catalog Management. Great progress on these cornerstone initiatives has been made, and we look forward to continuing the engagement.
In particular, Coalition members remain hopeful to see the next steps in achieving the administrator’s vision for schedules transformation. The aforementioned cornerstones must be buttressed by fundamental reforms of the MAS pricing policies and procedures for services. Reform of the pricing policies is central to increasing schedules accessibility and ease of use for commercial firms to offer their commercial services and solutions “in a way that best fits their technology and the way their customers actually want to buy things.” Pricing reform can be a win-win-win for customer agencies, GSA, MAS contractors, and, ultimately, the American people. The “building blocks” for that reform include:
These pricing reform building blocks are needed now more than ever to support the partnership between government and industry in meeting the challenges we face as a nation. These building blocks will increase transparency, increase competition and access to the commercial market, and reduce unnecessary contract duplication. A true “best in class” contract is all about outcomes for customers, and the vision laid out by GSA in December of 2018 was all about best value outcomes for customer agencies. Coalition members stand ready to work with GSA on this shared vision for schedules transformation.
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