GSA reaffirms goal of speeding up schedule contracts

The General Services Administration is examining how it will deliver on its new administrator's pledge to bring the average time it takes businesses to get listed on its contracting schedules down to 30 days, a top agency official said Wednesday.

GSA will incorporate management methodologies such as Six Sigma or Capability Maturity Model Integration into its schedule approval process, said John Johnson, the agency's acting assistant commissioner for integrated technology solutions, at a breakfast in Tysons Corner, Va. The agency also will start sending out acknowledgment of receipt letters to applicants within 24 hours, Johnson said.

The 30-day pledge, first made by Lurita Doan in June shortly after she assumed the job of administrator, also could apply to businesses seeking a modification of their existing schedule contract, Johnson said. But he added that he could not commit to that timeline.

Businesses will have a role to play in meeting the 30-day goal, Johnson said. "We're also going to expect you all to be more timely in responding to any questions we have," he said.

Getting onto a GSA schedule -- a list of contracts available to agencies across government -- currently can be an expensive and protracted process, taking from several months to a year. The bureaucratic hurdles can be especially frustrating for small businesses.

A January 2006 small-business white paper said GSA rejected Dallas-based Think Computer's application after four months of evaluation "due to a typo on the pricing spreadsheet… never mentioned before; it listed an hourly consulting rate as being $2.05 higher than the same rate on an invoice." The paper's author, Think Computer owner Aaron Greenspan, said Wednesday he can no longer comment on GSA.

In the white paper, Greenspan said the employee evaluating his GSA application had difficulty accepting files electronically, and requests for additional information often came through the postal system. One required form was available on the GSA Web site, but only in Adobe Acrobat format, requiring it "to be printed out and then scanned in again in order to fax it back with the bank's handwritten verification," Greenspan wrote.

GSA is seeking to update its electronic application submission tools, Johnson said. "Only about 4 percent of the action happens using those tools," he added.

Schedules account for around 80 percent GSA's information technology solutions portfolio. IT Schedule 70 did $17.3 billion of business during fiscal 2006, according to just-released GSA numbers. That amounts to about 2 percent more than fiscal 2005's total of $16.9 billion.

The Defense Department is by far the largest customer of GSA's schedules. The relationship between the two federal agencies has been strained lately by a disagreement about appropriations law. Johnson said the two agencies have been in talks, and GSA is interested in ensuring that Defense "procedures don't encourage folks not to use GSA."