This article is an excerpt from The Art of Tendering: A Global Due Diligence Guide, which is available for purchase.
In its June 2018 report entitled DOD Should Develop a Strategy for Assessing Contract Award Time Frames, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the Department of Defense (DOD) lacked baseline information to determine how long it takes to award its contracts, which undermined its ability to assess any improvements in its contract award timeframes. As the report stated:
Although the Department of Defense (DOD) has proposed reducing the time it takes to award contracts related to weapon systems, the department has a limited understanding of how long it currently takes and therefore lacks a baseline to measure success. The DOD components GAO reviewed—Air Force, Army, Defense Logistics Agency, and Navy—collect data on their time frames for awarding contracts. However, they do so in different ways in the absence of a DOD-wide strategy for what information should be collected. For example, the Air Force measures the time to award beginning with solicitation issuance, while the other components use a different starting point. As a result, information the components collect is not comparable and is of limited use for understanding contract award time frames department-wide. Determining what information is needed to monitor time taken to award contracts consistently across components should help DOD assess its progress toward reducing the time.
GAO analyzed the time from solicitation issuance to award for 129 weapon systems-related contracts and found it ranged from less than a month to over 4 years. Although some DOD and industry officials stated that contract value could affect contract award time frames, GAO observed a wide range of time intervals and did not observe any patterns based on this characteristic.
The report also noted that timelines were impacted by internal prioritization and on the responsiveness of suppliers to post-bid information requests:
According to DOD contracting officials GAO surveyed, factors that can help reduce—or, alternatively lengthen—the time between when a solicitation is issued to when a contract is awarded include a decision to make the contract award an office priority and how quickly contractors respond to requests for additional information after initial proposals are received.
The report identified a number of factors that contribute to the length of time it takes to award contracts, with contract value, contract type, quality of supplier proposals, lack of proper delegation to award, lack of evaluator training, midstream changes to requirements by the government, and bid protests identified specifically as causes that contributed to delays in contract awards. The report concludes that the standardized collection of process timeframe information across the various departments of the military was an essential first step to developing broader institutional strategies for streamlining the procurement process:
Having a DOD-wide strategy could enable DOD to consistently and comprehensively track contract award time, assess the factors contributing to this time, leverage the various efforts that the components have taken, identify any best practices, and measure progress toward any goals for reducing the time to award contracts. Currently, DOD does not define the events that should be measured occurring prior to solicitation or those that occur between solicitation issuance and contract award. While the military components collect various information about the length of time to award contracts based on their specific needs and organizational structures, at a minimum, DOD should have relevant information for its own management purposes. As DOD implements provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018, the department has an opportunity to identify what data, if any, beyond just the overall procurement administrative lead time should be collected and reported. Identifying the information that is to be collected is a necessary first step for DOD to assess its progress in reducing the time taken to award contracts.
As this report illustrates, collecting the necessary information about current practices is a prerequisite to empowering an institution’s ability to establish accountability controls and accelerate tendering cycles in a manner that produces measurable results.
