GSA and OPM Sign With 109 Vendors for Human Capital Training

As part of the Obama administration’s “buy as one” push for purchasing under category management, the General Services Administration on Monday unveiled a major multi-vendor human capital and training contract in partnership with the Office of Personnel Management.

The Human Capital and Training Solutions (HCaTS) contracts signed with 109 vendors will provide tailored employee development, workforce development strategy and organizational performance improvement services to all agencies.

The vehicle is the first governmentwide human capital solution using category management, according to the White House Office of Federal Procurement Policy.

It consists of two multiple-award, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity task order contract vehicles with an $11.5 billion ceiling, GSA said. Seventy-two unrestricted contracts were awarded under the HCaTS vehicle and 37 were set aside for small businesses under the HCaTS SB vehicle. “HCaTS cuts costs and increases efficiency by maximizing the return on investment in human capital management and training services,” said GSA, which will handle administration of the contracts while OPM manages the programs.

“Partnering with OPM to award this strategically sourced initiative has been an excellent demonstration of interagency collaboration,” said GSA Administrator Denise Turner Roth. “Together, we’re providing a solid acquisition solution using [the Federal Acquisition Service’s] acquisition expertise, married with OPM’s HR and training expertise, to deliver federal workers training and support they need while making sure agencies can save time and money.”

Acting OPM Director Beth Cobert said, “The HCaTS contracts allow federal agencies to not only take a highly efficient and innovative approach to their human capital and training requirements, but also to lean on OPM’s expertise in human capital and category management.”

The White House also weighed in. “Category management empowers agencies with the spending data and contract intelligence to make more effective buying decisions that better respond to an agency’s needs, leverage budget resources and benefit taxpayers,” said Office of Federal Procurement Policy Administrator Anne Rung. HCaTS “will save agencies 4-14 percent and reduce the number of contracts by 5 percent in its first year.”

The contract awards were made using a Highest Technically Rated with Fair and Reasonable Prices evaluation method, GSA said. The schedule calls for an ordering period of 10.5 years, plus an additional five-year period to allow for task order completion.

To promote small business participation, HCaTS was designed as an unrestricted contract vehicle that includes significant small business subcontracting goals, while the separate HCaTS SB is structured as a total small business set-aside contract vehicle.  

Industry analyst Brian Friel, who runs One Nation Analytics, wrote that HCaTS “is the latest GSA vehicle to use a points-based scoring system to evaluate bids. Offerors self-scored themselves on a mix of relevant experience, past performance and certifications, and then submitted documentation that GSA used to validate the scores.”

Friel found that a majority of the bidders on the suite of contracts “had their proposals tossed out on technicalities.”