INTERSERVICE INTEGRATION
Because the military-specific projects must be below the military construction threshold of $1 million, fewer ven- dors are interested in them than in the multimillion-dollar projects to support the World Cup.
With the smaller number of vendors to meet continued mission requirements, the Air Force and Army contracting activ- ities were looking to streamline the award process by establishing a multiple-award construction contract or multiple-award task order contract. Tese contract vehi- cles would allow the contracting offices to lock in a vendor base and ensure that they would be able to satisfy the requirements of their customers. Both agencies released requests for proposals and quickly real- ized that if they did not work together, the Army and Air Force would be com- peting for a relatively small subset of vendors that would be interested in these lower-dollar projects.
PINPOINTING THE PROBLEM During the first week of May 2016, while the Army and Air Force organizations were developing their independent con- tract vehicles, a joint contracting support
GETTING THE JOB DONE
Staff Sgt. Charles Wilson, 379th ECONS construction contracting officer, talks with a supervisor at a construction site in January at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar. When military construction projects took a back seat to much more lucrative construction projects in preparation for the 2022 FIFA World Cup soccer tournament, Army and Air Force contracting offices took a unified approach to create larger, more appealing contract opportunities. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Terrica Y. Jones, 379th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs)
board (JCSB) was being established in Qatar.
Joint Publication 4-10, Opera-
tional Contract Support, identifies the JCSB as “the primary JFC [joint force commander] mechanism to coordinate and deconflict contracting actions within a designated operational area.”
It was during the initial JCSB that the U.S. Central Command operational con- tract support integration cell (OCSIC) discovered the duplication of effort. Te OCSIC is the lead agency within the combatant command that is responsible for integrating and synchronizing opera- tional contract support. Te contracting activities discussed the best
resolution
and decided that the 408th Contracting Support Brigade would continue with the award of a contract vehicle that could support both organizations.
Both commanders recognized that this was an opportunity to work together and gain efficiencies. Under the system that existed prior to this collaboration, each office was responsible for its own construction contract vehicle. By using a joint contract vehicle supporting both organizations, the
commanders had
the flexibility to prioritize other, non- construction requirements from their customers and focus on new strategic contracts to support the command.
ADDRESSING CONCERNS Initial discussions between the two staffs raised several concerns:
• A lack of a common contract writing system between the services in Qatar. In theater, the Army used (and still uses) Procurement Defense Desktop (PD2) as the primary means of writing and awarding contracts. Te Air Force, although trained on PD2 stateside, uses oContrax as its contract writing system in theater. Tough the two sys- tems have similar objectives, they lack a common system architecture that would allow them to communicate with each other.
• A major difference between the orga- nizations in accepting and invoicing procedures. Te Army relies on the Wide Area Workflow (WAWF) suite of applications, while the Air Force uses a manual invoice process through Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina.
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Army AL&T Magazine October-December 2016
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