Some major news in government contracting has been receiving
little attention. The General Services
Administration (GSA) is leading an effort to roll up several major government
systems into one single interface: the
System for Award Management (SAM).
The unassuming acronym belies a major shift in the way
government agencies interact with each other and vendors. This new system will supplant nine existing
federal systems for government-vendor relations:
- Central Contractor Registry (CCR)
- Federal Agency Registration (FedReg)
- Online Representations and Certifications Application (ORCA)
- Excluded Parties List System (EPLS)
- Electronic Subcontracting Reporting System (eSRS)
- Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act Subaward Reporting System (FSRS)
- Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA)
- Federal Business Opportunities (FBO)
- Wage Determination (WDOL)
- Federal Procurement Data System – Next Generation (FPDS-NG)
- Past Performance Information Retrieval System (PPIRS)
GSA describes the benefits of SAM as “streamlined and
integrated processes, elimination of data redundancies, and reduced costs while
providing improved capability.” The
system, if implemented as planned, would certainly accomplish those
benefits. For vendors, maintaining a
single login is benefit enough, but the rollup also means that there will be
one place to update company info. And
while the backend systems are not visible to the public, there would appear to
be quite a few efficiencies to be realized there as well.
Although SAM represents a welcome shift toward efficiency,
it should be noted that the launch of SAM has been pushed back several months. The
more things change, the more they stay the same. Here’s hoping that the delay is not a forbearer
of difficulty for SAM.
The rollout of SAM has been organized into four phases, each
with a group of legacy system that will be assimilated:
Phase 1 – May 2012 (now July 2012)
- CCR
- FedReg
- ORCA
- EPLS
Phase 2a – Dec 2012 /June 2013
- eSRS
- FSRS
- CFDA
Phase 2b – TBD
- FBO
- WDOL
Phase 3 – TBD
- FPDS-NG
The SAM site (www.SAM.gov)
has a number of resources to help users prepare for the change. For vendors, all previous information will be
rolled over into the new system. The
only action necessary will be to create a new login.
