CORRALLING CONTRACTS


FIGURE 1


FIRST, ORGANIZE THE DATA


The Enterprise Requirements Management System (ERMS), ASC Service Requirements Tracking Database (ASRTD) and Services Contract Approval (SCA) Routing systems that the command developed provided the tools it needed to track service contracts, setting the stage to build a team with the skills to use the data effectively. (All graphics courtesy of ASC)


larger issues across the entire DOD. As recently as May 2015, a U.S. Army Audit Agency report stated, “Army leaders had no reliable means of knowing how many service contracts had been awarded for the Army or the value of those contracts.” It’s not a huge leap to infer from this state- ment that this lack of visibility brings with it inherent waste, and that opportunities exist to achieve significant savings.


SERVICES CONTRACTING A TEAM SPORT Instructors


at University (DAU)


the Defense Acquisition are fond of saying,


“Services contracting is a team sport,” one that involves all stakeholders. During the initial phase of assuming responsibility for the LRCs, the newly assembled ASC stakeholders were not functioning as a team. Complicating factors included the geographical dispersion of the LRCs and the diversity and geographical disper- sion of supporting contracting agencies. Additionally, as several audits have docu- mented, Army commands responsible for the organizations generating the require- ments for service contracts had neither the automated tools nor the business skills to take on the task of managing service con- tracts throughout their life cycle.


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With a desire to gain visibility of all service contracts at the command level to enable program management, and considering the lack of an Army enterprise business intelligence tool that could manage this type of information, ASC realized it had to help itself, and help itself fast. Te first step was to build an inventory of service contracts, establish processes to review and approve requirements and then create automated tools to support these processes. Historically, DOD had seen service con- tracts as enablers in fulfilling operational requirements, not as something in their own right, and as a result there were no automation systems in place to track them outside of the contracting community.


ESTABLISHING THE DATABASE Out of necessity, ASC developed the Enter- prise Requirements Management System (ERMS), the ASC Service Requirements Tracking Database


(ASRTD) and Ser-


vices Contract Approval (SCA) Routing. ERMS is an automated tool that facili- tates requirements validation and creates a detailed record of services requirements for the current budget year. ASRTD maintains a record of current and closed contracts, creating a historical record con- necting contracts to requirements and the


forecast life cycle based on programmed periods of performance. SCA Routing is an automated staffing and approval tool to process the request form for services con- tract approval, which also shares data with ASRTD. (See Figure 1.)


Once ASC was able to track service con- tracts, leaders wanted to put together a team with the skills to use that data to


As recently as May 2015, a U.S. Army Audit Agency report stated, “Army leaders had no reliable means of knowing how many service contracts had been awarded for the Army or the value of those contracts.”


Army AL&T Magazine October-December 2016


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