Chief Acquisition Officers Council 2012 Acquisition Excellence Awards

1. Individual Award Winner – Effective Vendor Communication – Mr. Edward Schultz, HHS. As the Chief of the CDC Procurement and Grants Office, Acquisition and Assistance Branch, Mr. Schultz oversees the purchase of all vaccines and vaccine-related services for the CDC’s Vaccine for Children and adult vaccination programs. Purchases associated with the vaccine entitlement programs are available only from large businesses and account for roughly 70% of all contract dollars awarded by CDC. In FY11, Mr. Schultz began a concerted campaign to engage 8(a) small business contractors for nonvaccine-related supplies and services to demonstrate a measurable increase in his branch’s contribution to the CDC small business goals. Mr. Schultz reached out to small businesses that had not previously done business with the CDC, thereby increasing competition and awards to small business. Mr. Schultz’s outreach resulted in a 500% increase to his branch’s 8(a) awards and a 600% increase in their SDB awards.
2. Individual Award Winner – Strategic Sourcing – Ms. Ryan Luhman, DIA. Solutions for Information Technology Enterprises (SITE) is a multiple award contract vehicle for delivering information technology services that supports the global intelligence and command and control (C2) assets vital to the security of the United States. Departments and agencies supported by this contract vehicle include the Defense Intelligence Agency, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. SITE contracts were awarded to 6 large businesses and 5 small businesses. SITE allows DoD to leverage its buying power, streamline procurement processes and increase small business outreach. Ms. Luhman’s efforts have been instrumental in improving competition within the SITE contracts, and exceeding the small business goals. Instead of setting aside $20M per year for small business awards, awards have averaged $56M per year.
3. Team Award Winner – Buying Smarter – Missile Defense Agency Engineering and Support Services (MiDAESS). The MDA needed to develop a new performance-based acquisition construct to replace the legacy project-oriented system engineering and technical assistance (SETA) approach. The legacy system had been in place for over ten years and allowed organizations to randomly acquire their own services with no MDA-wide view of requirements. MDA chartered a program office to centralize and manage support services and establish consistent contractor performance reporting. The successful effort was led by the MiDAESS Management Council, comprising the PM, deputy PM, acquisition lead, business financial officer, COR, contracting directors, and requirements team leads. The resulting management of support services was realigned Agency-wide from 25 different organizations. The total labor cost savings for the agency was $140M/year or $700M over five years. The program resulted in an efficient agency-wide view of support needs, better buying practices, increased competition, and increased small business participation.

Winners:
Carolyn Goldberg, PM
Kyle Carter, Deputy PM
Jennifer Sullivan, Acquisition Functional Lead
Daphne Edwards, Business Financial Manager
Tammie, Newby, COR Lead
Robbie Phifer, MS Contracting Director
Ella Chapman, MS Deputy Contracting Director
Denise Walker, Requirements Team Lead
Lester Young, Requirements Team Co-Lead

Chief Acquisition Officers Council 2012 Small Business Excellence Award
Ms. Amy Lineberry, a GSA contracting officer, received a requirement to do a small business set-aside contract for a Region 8 requirement. After conducting extensive market research, she concluded that there were adequate SDVOSB firms identified and qualified to compete and made the solicitation a SDVOSB set-aside. After several challenging aspects of the procurement, Ms. Lineberry awarded the largest SDVOSB contract ever awarded by GSA Region 8 which greatly exceeded expectations. GSA, agency-wide, had struggled to meet the 3% SDVOSB goal and GSA Region 8 had not met that particular goal in recent years. It was anticipated that, with the award of the support service contract with an estimated value of approximately $6 million per year, GSA Region 8 would satisfy the 3% SDVOSB goal during the contract term (base years with four option years) and that award would also contribute towards the agency achieving the SDVOSB goal during that same term.