OASIS Interact Community

<p>Lisa,</p><p>Thanks for the update and for your continued outreach to the industry community!&nbsp; We have a few thoughts related to your pricing question.</p><p>Given the broad potential of the Integrations contract for clients across government and across the country, we agree that labor rate pricing will need to accommodate a wide range of needs.&nbsp; For any given labor category, for example &ldquo;Senior Program Analyst,&rdquo; vendors will need to be able to provide staff for situations ranging from a Top-Secret-cleared-with-polygraph NSA contract in a highly advanced program area in the DC Metro area (high cost clearance, high cost domain area, high cost location,) to a more straightforward, unclassified contract in Oklahoma (no clearance cost, lower cost domain area, lower cost location).&nbsp; For complex integrated contracts there can even be a wide range of costs within the project &ndash; from expert planners and advisory consultants to more tactical implementation staff.&nbsp;</p><p>A structure that allows for broadly applicable ceiling rates that are discounted at the task order level will help maximize use of the contract across Civilian and DOD customers.&nbsp; In this framework separate rate cards for government-site and contractor-site are useful, but the addition of further rate cards that differentiate geographic location or multiple clearance levels or other factors would create an unwieldy and inflexible structure.&nbsp; Market competition at the task order level will drive discounted rates to accommodate the unique circumstances of each task order.&nbsp; Additionally, this type of flexibility will insure that federal agencies will have access to the full range of talent that is available in the labor market. As a result, the GSA will be able to attract a larger percentage of the spending within the scope of GSA Integrations to use this contract vehicle and thereby eliminate the need for other agencies to create similar contract vehicles.&nbsp; This will result in administrative cost savings to the federal government as a whole.</p><p>We therefore would recommend an evaluation structure where: non-price factors are significantly more important than price; each price proposal will be evaluated but will not be assigned a rating; and price is evaluated to determine that labor rates are fair, reasonable, and balanced.&nbsp; This type of approach has been employed on major contracts such as GSA Alliant and DHS Eagle II.</p><p>Mark Youman</p><p>ICF International</p>