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Coast Guard Navigates Around Issues with Major Procurements |
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by Mickey McCarter
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Wednesday, 18 November 2009 |
Officials cite progress on Offshore Patrol Cutter, acquisition support contracts
The US Coast Guard (USCG) plans to release solicitations for two major acquisitions--including the "largest single procurement in Coast Guard history"--in the next year or so, USCG officials revealed during an acquisition panel in Virginia Beach, Va., Tuesday.
Rear Adm. Ronald Rábago, USCG chief acquisition officer, confirmed that the Coast Guard would publish a request for proposals (RFP) for the Offshore Patrol Cutter in the next year.
Hailing the cutter as the "largest procurement in Coast Guard history" in terms of dollars and the collective complexity of USCG assets, Rábago said his agency was busy finalizing the requirements for the Offshore Patrol Cutter, also known as the Maritime Security Cutter Medium.
In crafting the requirements, USCG officials have met with Coast Guard shipyards and asked for input as well as prime contractors with experience building large platforms in industry, Rábago noted.
The Coast Guard is conducting market evaluations to make the requirements exact and to minimize and risks or errors that might occur in the evaluation of responses to the RFP.
The Offshore Patrol Cutter would replace the 270-foot Famous class and the 210-foot Reliance class Medium Endurance Cutters, which together account for the vast majority of seafaring hours for Coast Guard assets, Rábago said.
The cutter represents one of the first shipbuilding activities managed by the young USCG Acquisition Directorate, which Rábago heads.
Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft, USCG assistant commandant for capability, distinguished the role of the Offshore Patrol Cutter (OPC) from that of the US Navy Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), a high-speed vessel built for maritime interdiction.
Saying there was "no overlap between the LCS program and what we look for in the OPC," Zukunft stated that the cutter would assist the Coast Guard in its ability to project law enforcement as far away from the homeland as possible.
The OPC must support 20-person boarding teams in heavy sea states with 8-10-foot waves, Zukunft added. The Coast Guard also must consider fuel costs when determining requirements for the OPC because the service will continue to have a limited fuel budget as the cost of fuel continues to climb in the coming decades.
Meanwhile, Clair Grady, head of the USCG Contracting Activity, revealed that a procurement for support services to the Acquisition Directorate and its project offices would go forward no sooner than the first quarter of next year.
Last year, the Coast Guard released a request for information to ask interested companies to identify their capabilities under a Program Management, Acquisition, and Administrative Support Services contract vehicle for the Acquisition Directorate its major project offices.
But Grady characterized the timing of the solicitation as "too optimistic." The Coast Guard ran into issues with defining inherently governmental functions, which could not be outsourced to contractors, she said.
So the Coast Guard is researching those issues to make certain the solicitation is consistent with federal law and guidelines from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and to address any organizational conflicts of interest. The Acquisition Directorate originally planned three separate categories for consolidated purchasing outside of information technology goods and services, including program management, engineering and technology expertise; business management, studies and analysis, and cost; and acquisition, contracts management, and administration professional support services.
Presently, the Coast Guard has updated the acquisition plan sent it to DHS headquarters for approval.
The agency hopes to make multiple contract awards under the program as early as the first quarter of fiscal 2011, Grady said.
Contracting pitfalls
Speaking at a panel at the USCG Innovation Expo held by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), Grady also explained that the Coast Guard has been making changes in its procurement operations to work smarter.
For example, the Coast Guard recently reduced the number of contracting officers it would place in the field, noting that many of them were too busy with very small procurements.
Many of the 42,000 transactions for the Coast Guard in fiscal 2009 had relatively small dollar values, Grady said, leaving a lot of people to work hard in processing them without the opportunity to examine their strategic value.
To change this way of doing business, the Coast Guard has aligned its contracting officers with specific goods and services with the goal of establishing strategic vehicles to empower procurement personnel to work smarter. Setting up these strategic vehicles would free contracting officers to spend more time serving the needs of the operational communities across the Coast Guard instead of chasing small, individual procurements, Grady said.
With economic challenges resulting from the recession, the Coast Guard has been taking extra precautions to guard against contracting with companies that may go bankrupt or face other financial difficulties, thereby disrupting services or supplies to the agency, Grady added.
As part of its routine contracting due diligence, the Coast Guard was taking care to make responsibility determinations on potential contractors before entering into agreements with them, Grady cautioned.
Should the Coast Guard be unable to find enough financial information on a company, it may ask a potential contractor to submit additional financial documentation, she continued. The agency must have access to enough information to make contracting officers comfortable that companies will not falter and leave the Coast Guard without critical goods or services.
Despite generally embracing measures to ensure the reliability of contractors, Grady expressed skepticism over movement in some federal agencies to assign past performance evaluation scores to individual companies.
The Government Accountability Office has noted that federal agencies have a bad track record of completing and implementing such evaluation scores, Grady noted.
While Coast Guard officials generally were interested in doing anything that would help the procurement process and make contracting easier for both government and industry, she wondered if evaluation ratings would mire contracting efforts in additional legal contests as companies protested the past performance scores.
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Mickey McCarter |
| About the author: |
| eNewsletter Editor/Senior Washington Correspondent,
is a journalist with more than a decade of experience in reporting
on
military affairs and information technology.
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