The Army will amp up its use of the General Services Administration's OASIS contract – to the tune of $500 million a year – according to a new memorandum of understanding signed by the two agencies March 16.
OASIS is a multibillion dollar contract that offers professional services, such as financial management and engineering, scientific and logistics services. OASIS also features separate contracts for small businesses and larger firms.
Kevin Page, deputy commissioner at GSA's Federal Acquisition Service, said at the signing ceremony as budgets continue to shrink agency missions remain critical, and the OASIS contract helps agencies meet their missions while reducing duplicative contracts.
"Our federal state and local partners need the savings we provide so that they can focus on their critical missions. And few agencies have a mission more critical than the United States Army," Page said at the signing ceremony.
The Army is not the only service that has pledged to use OASIS. The Air Force signed an agreement last year to spend up to $500 million on the contract vehicle. By agreeing to $500 million a year the Army gets a break on the contracting fee, dropping the rate from 0.75 percent to 0.1 percent.
"By using OASIS the Army will reduce excess costs resulting from multiple contracts, shorten the amount of time it takes to execute a contract or an order and gain insight into the spending and good acquisition practices across the government in obtaining the best value for professional services," Page said.
Harry Hallock, deputy assistant secretary of procurement for the Army, said the memorandum allows the Army to get a better rate from GSA and give it another avenue to boost small business contracting.
"To ensure we are continuing to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars, we will use the OASIS contracting vehicle to support our strategy of minimizing duplication of contracting efforts where we've determined the risk to be low," said Harry Hallock,
The Army already spends about $3.5 billion a year with GSA and about $65 billion in overall contracting in fiscal 2014, so the Army anticipates easily meeting the goal, Hallock said.
The Army will most likely spend the bulk of that money on professional services as well as using the contract to boost its spending on small business contracts.
"I think it will grow our small business percentage,"Hallock said.
