Making Contracting Sexier

By Jay Friess
Editor

Stealth fighter jets are cool. Unmanned strike planes, reprogrammable cruise missiles and electromagnetic catapults are also pretty sweet.

The process for purchasing those things from contractors, according to Brian Scolpino of the Naval Air Systems Command’s acquisitions management office, is not so much.

“This stuff called acquisitions, this contracting is not sexy stuff; it’s hard,” Scolpino told an audience Thursday at an Acquisition Improvement Team Update program hosted that the Southern Maryland Higher Education Center by The Patuxent Partnership.

That is why the command has developed two new pieces of software to help acquisitions managers track the progress of contract solicitations and bids and write consistently-worded proposals.

Scolpino said that NAVAIR’s purchasing process has been fractured and “misused for some 15 to 17 years.” During NAVAIR’s move from Crystal City, Virginia to Naval Air Station Patuxent River in the 1990s rounds of Base Realignment and Closure, much of the command’s institutional knowledge did not make the trip.

“We have lost a lot of knowledge and a lot of talent,” Scolpino declared, saying that the command’s current generation of procurement staff has not been properly trained on how to buy Navy equipment. The result, he said, is that many have had to make up their own policies on the job, creating a patchwork of different processes across NAVAIR’s 33 program offices. “We’ve gotten rid of a lot of how-tos. … There is no book that exists on how to do your job.”

NAVAIR’s new Procurement Process Management System aims to bring standardization and consistency to the command’s buying processes. The system helps managers prioritize spending, gives them a visual display to show contracting progress and holds them accountable for missed milestones.

“You are now being held accountable,” Scolpino said. “Imagine that. We don’t do that very well.”

Managers have already been trained to use the software in 23 of NAVAIR’s program offices, Scolpino said. But the tool won’t work without the support of program managers. “Leadership has to back this. This doesn’t work if leadership doesn’t back this.

But even if programs can now successfully track and manage their buying processes, they still have to write contract proposals that meet the programs’ needs in order to avoid delays from rewriting requirements and re-issuing proposals. For this, NAVAIR is fielding a database file that can compose work statements using fill-in-the-blank data.

The Automated Requirement Roadmap Tool was developed by the Pentagon’s Defense Acquisition University and quietly deployed last summer, according to Richard Mattson, AIR 4.0/5.0 recruiting lead. Mattson demonstrated the software for the audience, showing how it can compose standardized sentences after the user selects various verbs, nouns and descriptors from drop-down menus.