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Identifying New Contract Opportunities
This week's quiz provides stimulation for creative thinking about identifying agency contract opportunities:
During FY 2002 quarters one and two, what share of the Environmental Protection Agency's reported prime contract dollar total was spent on contracts synopsized in FedBizOpps prior to award? A) 4% B) 19% C) 49% D) 72% E) 98%
When you use FedBizOpps (www.fedbizopps.gov) to identify agency contracting opportunities , how sure can you be that the "single government point-of-entry for federal government procurement opportunities over $25,000" reports all spending opportunities at each agency? Let's take the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as an example. Here's how to solve this week's quiz using Eagle Eye's FPC Advanced database application:
Fire up your new FY 2002 Quarters 1-2 application and clear all prior search criteria by clicking the small funnel icon on the tool bar and then clicking the Clear View button in the View Definition dialog. Click the Apply button and return to the Agency Active View Screen.
Next, activate the FPC Search Wizard or Advanced Search functions by clicking the appropriate button on the Active View Sidebar. Select the Contract Group of fields. Scan down the list of available Contract fields until you get to Synopsis of Procurement. Highlight this field and click the Binoculars icon to call up the index of available search terms.
Code A, Synopsized Prior to Award, is the search term we want. It's the first term in the list. Highlight this item in the index and click the OK button. Finish the search by clicking Apply and returning to the Agency Active View Screen.
Scan down the ranked list of agencies on the Agency Active View Screen until you find the EPA. It will be ranked 21st based on expenditures reported in the View $ column. In this case, the View $ represent the dollars spent on contracts synopsized by the EPA prior to award. The percentages displayed in the % of Row $ column represent the selected dollars as a share of total EPA spending in FY 2002 YTD. The figure shown is 19.4%, making B the correct answer to this week's quiz.
This tells us that EPA only provides advanced FBO notification for one out of every five dollars the EPA spends. If we assume that announced FBO opportunities often appear too late to act upon anyway, it's clear that EPA contractors must have relationships within the agency as well as other corroborating sources of information about EPA's contracting patterns and plans in order to be able to bid in a timely and intelligent manner.
Because the bulk of EPA's spending is for services, and because services tend to be ongoing and repetitive from year to year, the historical contract spending information in Eagle Eye's FPC Advanced database provides not only context and prioritization to your market research but advanced notification about terminating contracts and candidate re-compete opportunities. An opportunity identification service like epipeline that covers new environmental and facilities management can then be leveraged to greatest advantage.
Data supplied by Eagle Eye Publishers, Inc.
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