PHOENIX - As part of EM's commitment to more timely decision-making, work is underway to identify ways to accelerate the competing and award of cleanup contracts, an EM representative said here last week.
Currently, it takes almost two-and-a-half years to conduct a procurement for an EM contract, Tamara Miles, assistant director at the EM Consolidated Business Center, said during a panel presentation at this year's Waste Management Symposia. EM is working to cut that time by approximately 50 percent.
“EM must remain focused on high-quality acquisitions and not just accelerated timelines," she said.
Among the steps EM is taking to accelerate acquisitions is the development of updated source selection guidance, which Miles said is intended to provide a “more step-by-step" approach to conduct acquisitions. To further ensure consistency between procurements, EM is updating a variety of procurement-related templates, such as those used for acquisition plans, source selection plans, source evaluation board reports, and other documents. The program also is seeking to standardize clauses in requests for proposals.
“It's important for us to be consistent from procurement to procurement," Miles said.
Efforts are advancing to develop what Miles described as a “cadre of technical resources," including trained source selection officials, source evaluation board chairs, and other subject-matter experts, to help streamline procurements. Such a program is expected to build the proficiency of technical members through involvement on multiple procurements, according to Miles.
EM is also working to further improve how proposals for cleanup contracts are prepared and evaluated, Miles said.
“We're asking for too much," she said.
For example, EM is considering changes to the evaluation criteria used to assess proposals to eliminate the experience evaluation factor, Miles said, adding that the National Nuclear Security Administration already uses such an approach. The intent would be to focus on those evaluation factors that are true discriminators among proposals - chiefly technical approach and key personnel and organization. Since typically experience is the lowest-ranked evaluation criteria in EM procurements, its elimination is expected to have little overall impact on how proposals are evaluated yet save a significant amount of time and effort, Miles said.
EM is also considering ways to streamline the development and evaluation of cost proposals. Such proposals are typically expensive for offerors to prepare and one of the more difficult parts of the evaluation process, she said.
Miles said EM's goal is to have various improvements to speed acquisitions in place by the end of the year.
“We want to continue to produce high quality, consistent, acquisition outcomes," she said.
Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Environmental Management
