GSA Blog

A Strong Start to the New Year: Simplifying the Acquisition Experience with Even More Federal Marketplace Strategy Improvements

As we head into a new year, modernizing and simplifying the government buying and selling experience for all stakeholders continues to be a top priority for GSA. During my first few months with the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS), I’ve committed us to maintaining momentum towards this goal through our Federal Marketplace (FMP) Strategy. Today, I’m pleased to announce our FMP Winter 2020 Release, which bundles GSA’s latest set of policy, process, and technology improvements. 

While there are many noteworthy enhancements outlined in this release, there are a few standouts I want to highlight. First, we continue to make progress towards the Multiple Award Schedules (MAS) Consolidation. Earlier today, we started issuing the Mass Modification to all current Schedule contract holders to align the terms and conditions of their contracts with those of the new consolidated solicitation. We are now one step closer to a more consistent Schedule environment, where customers can easily buy solutions, and vendors can easily offer them.   

Secondly, we are optimizing our business processes using Robotic Process Automation and data mining to save taxpayers money and ensure the security of the supply chain. For example, after a successful pilot we are rolling out our Truman Bot across all of FAS. Truman automates many of the administrative tasks required to properly evaluate a new MAS offer. Additionally, now that the Prohibited Products Robomod is being run several times a year, customers can shop on GSA Advantage with increased confidence, knowing that FAS has added more sophisticated and powerful controls to screen millions of products, software and equipment for potential security risks. Both of these efforts greatly reduce the amount of time our employees spend on repetitive data entry and manual tasks so they can instead spend time negotiating better prices for federal agencies to create taxpayer savings.  

I hope you’ll take a look at all of the improvements we’ve made by visiting our website. I also encourage you to join us at our Federal Acquisition Service Training (FAST) 2020 Conference on April 14-16, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia to learn more about all we’re doing to advance acquisition.