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10,000 Federal Government Buyers “Acting as One”
What is the Issue?
There are 3,300 different acquisition offices with a spend of $445 billion in products and services in FY2015, with an average of 15.5 million procurement actions recorded. The unnecessary redundancy across the federal government drives up collective operating costs and wastes valuable tax dollars. The sheer complexity of available offerings in the acquisition landscape and the lack of shared information overwhelms contracting professionals and drives duplicative open market purchases.
What was the Intervention?
The goal was to create a tool that would simplify the complicated maze of regulations, policy and practices under which the workforce operates. The Acquisition Gateway, built by GSA, is a tool that helps federal government buyers from all agencies act as one acquisition community. The Gateway provides acquisition professionals with tools and digital services for use throughout the acquisition lifecycle.
How was performance management useful?
The Acquisition Gateway is closely linked to the Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) goal for Category Management - Expand the use of high-quality, high-value strategic sourcing solutions in order to improve the government’s buying power and reduce contract duplication. The Gateway is focused on operationalizing the strategies of category management into clearly defined actions and information for the acquisition workforce to use. In conjunction with the adoption of category management as an acquisition strategy, the Executive Branch charter for the Acquisition Gateway is to eliminate siloed buying activities as outlined in the December 4, 2014 Office of Management and Budget memo, “Transforming the Marketplace: Simplifying Federal Procurement to Improve Performance, Drive Innovation and Increase Savings”.
What was the impact?
By the end of FY16, there were 10,000 users in the Acquisition Gateway, with more than 50 agencies represented in the user base. These results are in line with the Acquisition Gateway’s Agency Priority Goal (APG) goals of fostering increased use of the Acquisition Gateway, resulting in better purchasing decisions and increased productivity of the acquisition workforce . As a result of significant development and outreach efforts, the Acquisition Gateway is becoming the go-to hub for acquisition professionals across the federal government. It is not only the sheer number of users that makes the Gateway so strong, but rather the contributions its users are making through sharing expertise, best-practice samples and templates, and in many cases the content and data that the growing community relies on for smart decision-making at each step of the acquisition lifecycle. All the content, apps, and data that are created and curated for the Gateway now reach this widening audience, providing Government with a new way to connect with each other.
