THE INDUSTRIAL BASE
Megan Lacy & Corbin Hennen
BETTER-WRITTEN REQUIREMENTS When DOD releases a request for proposal, and then materially changes the requirements after the request, it costs companies money, said Strauss of Connected Logistics. He noted that, in the week before he talked with Army AL&T, he had seen two different requests amended by DOD “that significantly changed the requirements” before both were canceled.
“What it means from industry’s perspective is additional time and effort spent to revise and resubmit proposals. And we’re one of X number of bidders. If you look across all bidders on a given opportunity, you probably easily have 1,800 to 2,000 hours being spent by industry to revise these proposals. On one hand, the government may look at it and say, well, we need to make sure the requirement is right. But perhaps in this case, with additional time spent upfront by the government, it might have saved 2,000 hours on the industry side, which in the end, saves the govern- ment money.”
xTechSearch was some of our first real significant funding.” Lumineye has been able to get funding though some high-tech startup accelerators. “Initially, cash flow is extremely important. And even as you go on, for hardware and everything, if I need the tooling and everything else set up at a particular point in time and that cash flow doesn’t make the time that they origi- nally intended it to, that can delay everything.”
Many startups and small businesses work on very tight, and often unforgiving, margins. “Every business has to make assumptions,” said Lacy. “But startups and small businesses have to make a lot of assumptions about their revenue model and where they’re going to get funding and when they’re going to get that funding. And you want those to be as accurate as possible because you’re spend- ing money on different investments.
“I think one of the things that the DOD could be helpful with is faster payment and regular execution dates. With contracts, there’s always a little bit of wiggle room as to when they’ll actu- ally start, versus when you’re selected for them. So having some consistency there would do wonders.”
CONCLUSION Much has changed since the Army convened its first innovation summit in 2016. DOD, working with Congress, received new authorities beginning with the 2017 National Defense Appropri- ations Act to get small, innovative businesses on board. Despite the paperwork and the bureaucracy faced by the companies that Army AL&T talked to, their work would have been much harder, if not impossible, if the government had had to rely on traditional Federal Acquisition Regulation-based contracting.
New organizations like the U.S. Army Futures Command and DIU, and new efforts to reach small businesses like the xTech- Search, will enable a more diverse ecosystem to meet the Army’s evolving needs. For these businesses and others like them, trends are promising, but more work needs to be done.
For more information, contact the author at mbold@network-
runners.com.
MICHAEL BOLD provides contract support to the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center. He is a writer-editor for Network Runners Inc., with more than 30 years of editing experience at newspapers, including the McClatchy Washington Bureau, Te Sacramento Bee, the San Jose Mercury News, the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He holds a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Missouri.
https://asc.ar my.mil
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