The Highest Technically Rated Offeror with Reasonable Price (HTRO-RP) flips the script on what to prioritize when expediting selection decisions.
This practice allows award to the highest technically rated offer that is also found to have a reasonable price without using trade-offs between cost or price and technical. This practice ranks or rates offerors according to technical factors following either the Self Scoring Model or a government technical evaluation. Price evaluation of only the highest ranked or rated offer proceeds next. Price reasonableness can be determined through various techniques such as benchmarking or statistical analysis (within one standard deviation of offeror distribution, for example). If the offeror’s price is not determined to be fair and reasonable, the offer is rejected and the next highest ranked or rated offer is evaluated until award can be made to the highest ranked or rated offeror with a fair and reasonable price.
Agencies have successfully used this technique in FAR 15 and FAR 16.5 procurements. Not recommended for acquisitions where cost is a significant consideration. Also not recommended for FAR Part 8 actions because of statutory and regulatory requirement that best value determinations result in the lowest overall cost alternative (considering price, special features, administrative costs, etc.).
- Promotes efficiency in acquisition through a streamlined selection decision, especially for knowledge based services where technical ability is of paramount concern to the point that cost is not used as a comparative discriminator among offerors.
- Allows technical capability to be prioritized over price and/or cost without requiring explicit trade-offs between technical and cost that are not likely to change the outcome.
- Ensures proposed pricing is more accurately associated with proposed quality of work.
- Simplifies the best value determination; provides a streamlined means to make award to the highest technically rated offeror.
- Accelerates time to award. An agency reported an award time of 79 days after release of the solicitation compared to 268 days for a comparable procurement.
This highly efficient prioritization of technical capability over price is not widely utilized for source selections. There are many offices which may benefit from experimentation with this selection methodology.
