Earlier this year, Secretary James Mattis released a new National Defense Strategy (pdf) for the first time in 10 years. One of the major goals of the new strategy is to drastically reduce acquisition timelines and cut the time required to award a contract by half. The initiative was echoed by Director of Defense Pricing Shay Assad at this year’s Government Contract Pricing Summit: “what we are interested in is changing [the award process] from 400-500 days to 30.”
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) developed the GAO Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide to establish a consistent methodology based on best practices for use across the federal government for developing, managing, and evaluating capital program cost estimates.
Like most government agencies, you look for ways to reduce the time and effort required to review contractor bids, but it’s a challenge. Contractors submit bids with inconsistent formatting, formula errors, missing calculations, and other issues that require you to double – and sometimes triple – check the numbers, which drains resources and takes too long.
For government contractors, the quoting process drives your business growth, so having the right pricing system in place is a must. For that reason, many companies have kicked Excel to the curb and are replacing it with either their homegrown pricing system or purchasing a purpose-built system, such as the market leading one from PROPRICER.
In their May 2017 story, Defense Contract Audit Agency Loses Focus, National Defense Magazine refers to DCAA’s recent annual reports to Congress, stating that
The measure of mission success [for DCAA] is that their audit activities provide a large return on investment by identifying a large number of adverse audit findings rather than on executing their primary advisory functions.
Organizations that perform estimating and pricing on a regular basis are familiar with the pain of Excel Macros. In this post, we highlight several reasons to illustrate why it’s time to end your reliance on Excel.
Consistency is the name of the game when it comes to profitably responding to U.S. Government requests for bids. Inconsistent bids set your organization up for failure vis-à-vis government contracts, as government bid reviewers and auditors want easy-to-understand bids that are consistent across multiple versions of a project as well as between projects. That’s difficult to achieve without PROPRICER, because each bid requires a complex and varied set of cost inputs – some based on data, many based on formulas and relationships between inputs.
Anyone involved in price estimating knows how often dates change, affecting large portions of your estimate and pricing calculations. Each time a date changes, you need to go back into tens, potentially hundreds, of Excel spreadsheets, re-enter data across multiple fields, and re-evaluate your subtotals to ensure they’re still accurate.
At least, that’s how firms without PROPRICER deal with date changes.
Common business solutions, including CRM, ERP, and project management (PM) tools, unify the data and functions necessary to perform the targeted sets of business tasks that are the lifeblood of your company. Users flock to these solutions because they offer a single system that gets the job done quickly and easily.
For government contractors, the quoting process is the driver of future growth. Pricing professionals, however, have historically lacked a single source to get their job done. Luckily, a unified estimating and pricing solution exists.