SAVE Award 2011 Ideas

Replace DCMA's cumbersome and bug-filled Electronic Document Workflow (EDW) system (https://home.dcma.mil/edw/) with a web-based system that is integrated with the Electronic Document Access (EDA) site (http://eda.ogden.disa.mil/).

Eliminate redundancies in the acquisition process. Many products and programs have oversight requirements pushing cost of oversight to be incongruent with risk to the USG. Start writing fixed price contracts with warranties that require the contractor to pay penalties in addition to replacement for defective items. Start writing contracts with penalties for late deliveries vs. incentives for early deliveries. This would... more »

Eliminate DCMA. It costs more than it benefits.

Take a hard look at all the other agencies in DoD as well.

Acquisition needs serious reform when our forces, in many cases, can get better products quicker from the commercial market.

All contractors, whether production, services, R&D or otherwise, that charge to a federal contract should be earning no more than an equivalent GS employee. For example, when I was a brand new GS-13 earning $81K/yr, including all locality pay, my job was to negotiate federal contracts with a person, with the same qualifications, at a large contractor who earned $250K/yr plus bonuses and stock options, as verified with... more »

DCMA and DCAA should be merged into a single agency responsible for the administration and auditing of defense contracts. This would (1) Save money by reducing the overhead of running two separate agencies, (2) Improve coordination between auditing and administration activities, and (3) Reduce duplicate efforts.

Currently, contractual documents are delivered through EDW (electronic document workflow) and are reviewed by each member of the contract management team without regard to applicability to their function. Generally, that includes 1 GS06 or 07, three GS-11s, and perhaps 1 or two GS 12s. A fair assumption is that each of these individuals spend one hour per day reviewing contracts; so we can assume 5 hours per work day.... more »

The DoD should require Service (Army, Navy, etc.) buying commands to delegate OCONUS Contract Administration support to the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) whenever possible, and to report to their Service acquisition chief when they elect not to. Additionally, Service buying commands should reimburse DCMA on a fee-for-service basis whenever Contract Administration is delegated to DCMA. Currently, DCMA is... more »