Original Date: 04/07/1997
Revision Date: 04/14/2003

Rock Island Arsenal’s (RIA’s) contracting organization services the manufacturing facility, supporting offices, and major tenants in providing construction, materials, and services through contracts and purchase orders with private industry. Originally there was no formally established approach to advanced planning for major procurement actions. Organizations generating requirements would submit purchase requests with scopes of work when the need was recognized. This resulted in no up-front involvement from the contracting office and little planning for the long lead times characterized by major procurement actions. It also resulted in periods where backlogs developed, such as during the last quarter or month of the fiscal year when expiring funds were required to be obligated.

Acquisition planning began informally with the recognized need to keep track of milestones and balance the procurement workload throughout the fiscal year for better utilization of contracting resources. For FY95, Headquarters IOC directed implementation of a formal Advanced Acquisition Plan (AAP) to provide more visibility to major procurement milestones, provide a reporting mechanism for competition and socio-economic programs, and avoid having significant actions backlogged at the end of the fiscal year. RIA is in the third year AAP, which now uses Dbase 5 software for tracking and visibility. All actions over $100K are individually tracked. There are 202 projects in the FY97 AAP.

Customers are now required to identify their projects in advance of the fiscal year. The contracting office then participates in developing the scopes of work as necessary, and coordinates the required time frames through to contract award. This pre-planned effort results in distinct advantages over the previous informal planning. Customers are required to identify their projects earlier, allowing for more realistic acquisition lead times. The contracting office gets involved much earlier in the process by assisting in the development of scopes of work and eliminating the wasted time and resources spent when inadequate packages are returned for rework. By identifying all known projects before the fiscal year starts, the contracting office is able to establish project milestones and spread the contract awards evenly throughout the year rather than having them grouped at the end of the year. Lastly, the AAP, through tracking and monthly reports, provides continuous visibility to contracting goals and accomplishments.

The AAP better enables the contracting office to meet customer needs, establishes a steady workflow which optimizes the limited contracting resources, provides documented and realistic up-front planning, avoids unbalanced year-end spending, and enhances interdisciplinary coordination. The AAP, as implemented by RIA, is an effective tool for managing major procurement actions and planning for sufficient lead times to meet customer requirements.

For more information see the Point of Contact for this survey.