SBIR/STTR Award attributes
As of December 9, 2019, Amazon’s protest of the General Services Administration’s (GSA) e-commerce platform has created unnecessary lulls in Government-issued Purchase Card (GPC) buying power. The Trump administration is testing a new method for federal agencies to buy office supplies and other goods online in a market worth as much as $50B a year. Government officials are hoping e-commerce saves time, creates more competition for the government’s business and provides better information about how taxpayer money is spent. It is already reshaping government procurement, with federal workers using GPCs on the open market. 1.2 Opportunity. Specifically, and in light of this e-commerce intrusion, the Air Force plans to employ agile development, rapid prototyping, and more use of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), said Susan Thornton, Director for Information Dominance Programs in the Office of the Air Force’s Assistant Secretary for Acquisition. Air Force leaders at a lot of different levels are encouraging risk-taking to achieve results, but it’s not just risk for risk’s sake —it’s understanding the risks sufficiently to make decisions to pursue that higher risk path when it has the potential for high payoff. Maj. Gen. Cameron G. Holt, who manages contracting for the Air Force, said he sees e-marketplaces as a step up from clunky, Cold War-era purchasing procedures. Today when purchasing officials are in a pinch, they use a credit card. That leaves him with unanswered questions: Is the government getting a good price? Where was the item made? That said, the Air Force is striving to learn from several models of e-commerce in order to enhance the Air Force’s mission in terms of pricing, user ability, or governance. This largely in part to overcome current stovepipes regarding: No Self-Service Vendor Integration & Onboarding Multi-Source Inventory & Product Data Mapping Problems Rigid Tool Sets; Lack of Dynamic Workflow Rules No Automated Reconciliation of Invoices to Processed Orders (PO) Most e-commerce sites Built for Resellers; Suppliers Lacked Tools Solution. In light of recent protest congestion between Amazon and the General Services Administration (GSA), Special Operations Supply (SOS) is positioned NOW to offer the AF a Next-Gen e-commerce website innovation, SOS e-commerce. SOS e-commerce offers users greater visibility into transactional data, which provides more transparency on the service’s spending. Countering the stovepipes cited above, explicitly, SOS e-commerce offers the AF the following quantitative benefits: Integration Mapping Tool & Vendor Portal – Self-Service Private Vendor & Warehouse Integration Virtual Product Catalog – Multi-Source, Multi-Channel Catalog Management Workflow Engine: Integration, Listing & Fulfillment – Configurable & Dynamic Automation Rules Invoice Integration & Reporting – Reconcile Invoices from any format, automatically. Dropship Dealer Manager & Portal – Dropship Feed Generation & B2B Order Management
