SAVE Award 2011 Ideas

Stop making nickels and pennies. The production costs of these two coins far outwiegh their usefullness.

There is also a large percentage of these fixed costs that goes to raw materials.

Recommendation: Standardize the acquisition process across all DHS components (so that they use the same forms and formats, and follow the same policies and procedures), and provide hard review deadlines against which all stakeholders and interested parties must "speak now, or forever hold their peace"

Reason: Existing inconsistencies are confusing to the program personnel tasked with preparing acquisition... more »

The Government wastes too much time, resources, and money on its procurement process. One huge waste is in how if chooses (employee it can most afford to lose), trains (inconsist and minimally), resources (usually an extra duty), and receives recommendations (no standardized form) from the SEBs. Invartibly the SEB cannot uniformly give a recommendation that is relevent or helpful to the Contracting Officer or the Source... more »

Contract types should be focused on the program phase. Currently, MDAPs are usually put on one kind of contract (Cost Plus Award Fee, Firm-Fixed Price, etc) for the life of the contract. For example: Cost Plus Award Fee (CPAF) contracts should be reserved for early-lifecycle phases such as concept definition, up through Critical Design Review (CDR). At CDR, the requirements should be stable and the design well understood.... more »

A very simple federal cost cutting idea is to further streamline and expedite procurements by increasing Federal Acquisition Regulation dollar thresholds as follows:

1. FAR 2.101 - Micro-Purchase Threshold Definition: Replace the $3,000 threshold with $10,000.

2. FAR 2.101 - Government Point of Entry: Replace the $25,000 threshold with $100,000.

3. FAR 2.101 - Simplified Acquisition Threshold: Replace the $150,000... more »

For Performance based Logistics to really be productive, the DOD needs to ability to quickly put FC 30XX funding with 3400 funding. Currently if the contractor has a better part It can take years to bring a money saving idea on as type 30XX funding is difficult to get to put on a recommended performance enhancing modification, especially one funded with sustainment funding. The appropriation should be for the direct... more »

We all know that procurement of goods and services for the federal government is laborious. The very nature of the job is to improve the way we spend the taxpayer dollars with little risk and fast. However, 1102 procurement officers whether an apprentice or journeymen is burdened with the time it takes to maintain the integrity of systems and processes that either do not work, are not counted, or is duplicitous of other... more »