Best Practices from Defense Acquisition University's "DoD Sole Source Streamlining Toolbox"

Earlier this year, Secretary James Mattis released a new National Defense Strategy (pdf) for the first time in 10 years. One of the major goals of the new strategy is to drastically reduce acquisition timelines and cut the time required to award a contract by half. The initiative was echoed by Director of Defense Pricing Shay Assad at this year’s Government Contract Pricing Summit: “what we are interested in is changing [the award process] from 400-500 days to 30.”

The DoD Sole Source Streamlining Toolbox

In support of the DoD's goals in cutting award times, Defense Acquisition University has recently published the DoD Sole Source Streamlining Toolbox in their Tools Catalog. DAU describes the Toolbox as a "living document encompassing over 40 techniques which can be leveraged to increase efficiency throughout the acquisition process."

Section 1.6 of the Toolbox recommends “Obtaining Electronic Cost Models via the RFP” in order to reduce redundant efforts by government contracting personnel:

The importance of requiring a "fully-functional cost model" is stressed, in order to eliminate the common practice of rebuilding the contractor's cost model from scratch. The Toolbox goes on to instruct DoD buyers as to how ProPricer can be leveraged to exchange cost data with contractors without reformatting or rebuilding the cost model.

“The ProPricer working model can expedite the modeling process and facilitate constructive communications between the Government and the contractor during proposal evaluations, fact-finding, and negotiations.”

ProPricer users on both sides of the procurement process are seeing a direct and immediate impact on their pricing and proposal evaluation processes. Federal agencies are already reducing the award cycle by using ProPricer Government Edition, and contractors have seen as much as a 75% cut in proposal time and an 18% decrease in negotiation times using ProPricer Contractor Edition.

For all of the players willing to keep up with the developing standards and practices in federal acquisition, ProPricer offers solutions to support the mutual goals of government and industry.  

To learn more about ProPricer's solutions, see ProPricer for Government Contractors or ProPricer for Government Agencies.