When the General Services Administration (GSA) developed its Federal Market Plan to “reimagine and redesign the federal marketplace,” program leaders understood the need to dramatically improve the acquisition process. They honed in on four initiatives: Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) Consolidation, Commercial Platforms, a Contract Acquisition Life Cycle Management system, and Catalog Management.

The MAS Consolidation effort will consolidate GSA’s 24 MASs into a single Schedule for products, services, and solutions. On October 1, GSA marked completion of the first phase of this effort by issuing its MAS Consolidation solicitation, which contains information on offer preparation instructions, evaluation criteria, contract terms and conditions and relevant schedule attachments.

GSA Program Director Stephanie Shutt spoke about the initiative at a recent ACT-IAC Federal Insights Exchange meeting, explaining that GSA’s 24 MAS schedules “had been created in a siloed fashion.” As GSA grew to be more solution-based, solutions were added to existing schedules and new schedules were added. Over time, legacy schedules were “duplicative and siloed,” and that lack of consistency created procedural confusion among stakeholders and contracting officers.

“Industry then had to rearrange how they did things to fit our structure, which should never happen, and basically industry had to come in and get multiple contracts in the same program,” Shutt added.

The solicitation will be open for review and response on the new SAM.gov portal. According to Shutt, the second phase of the MAS Consolidation program is expected to be completed in January 2020, and the final phase will be completed July 2020.

Read the full article by Melissa Harris at Government CIO here: https://governmentciomedia.com/gsas-schedule-consolidation-effort-track-streamline-acquisition