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Additional Tools

This page contains a variety of tools to help the Acquisition Workforce. 

Human Capital Tools

This page contains helpful links and resources related to workforce management.

Contract Pricing Reference Guides

The Contract Pricing Reference Guides are a set of five reference volumes that were developed jointly by the Federal Acquisition Institute (FAI) and the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT)

The Guides are now maintained by the Office of the Deputy Director of Defense Procurement for Cost, Pricing, and Finance (DP/CPF). The Guides were developed to provide instruction and professional guidance for contracting personnel. They provide detailed discussion and examples applying pricing policies to pricing problems. However, as noted in FAR 15.404-1(a)(7), the Guides are not directive and should be considered informational only.

Contingency Contracting Corps

The Contingency Contracting Corps is a government-wide group of volunteer, trained contract specialists who provide on-call support to lead agencies in emergency response and recovery missions.

Accessibility Requirements Tool

GSA’s IT Accessibility Program has released the new Accessibility Requirements Tool (ART), as part of its mission to provide technical assistance to help federal agencies improve compliance and conformance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. ART is a step-by-step guide to help you easily identify and document accessibility requirements for government procurements and contracts, as well as in-house IT development. ART is intended to help you easily incorporate the requirements outlined in the Revised 508 Standards, released January 18, 2018, into your procurement documents.

Adhering to Section 508 Standards is critical when developing accessibility requirement statements, requesting accessibility information from vendors, and creating contract terms and conditions. ART is very similar to the BuyAccessible Wizard, but it has a more modern interface and it’s written to the Revised 508 Standards so you can create government accessibility requirement statements that align with the Revised 508 Standards.

Acquisition Gateway

The Acquisition Gateway, built by GSA, helps federal government buyers from all agencies act as one acquisition community. The Acquisition Gateway is a workspace that provides accurate, useful, and unbiased advice. It helps federal acquisition professionals learn what they need to know, connect with others to collaborate and communicate, and act to accomplish their tasks effectively. Our goal is to help make government acquisition great. 

Inside the Acquisition Gateway, you can find government-wide solution comparisons, connect with other acquisition professionals, and explore product and service category hallways. The hallways feature expert articles, templates, market research tools, prices paid data, and more to achieve successful outcomes at each step of the acquisition lifecycle.

Benchmarks.gsa.gov

The Benchmarks.gsa.gov website, developed in support of the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) Benchmarking Initiative, showcases the government-wide cost and efficiency metrics collected from agencies and allows agencies to leverage benchmark data to improve decision inputs and drive meaningful change within their mission-support functions.

The Benchmarks.gsa.gov website allows you to:

  • View bureau-level data for all agencies (where reported)
  • Customize peer groups to compare any set of agencies or bureaus across government
  • Export data and charts to easily merge with your internal reports and planning processes
  • Learn how your agency stacks up on dashboards of key metrics for each function

Please note that this site is not open to the public, but all Federal government employees and approved contractors with a MAX log-in can gain access using the following procedure:

  1. Go to  Benchmarks.gsa.gov and click on the OMB MAX button to reach the MAX log-in screen.
  2. After logging into MAX, you’ll be asked to register for the benchmarks site by sending an email to benchmarks@gsa.gov with “ACCESS REQUEST” in the subject line.
  3. Within 24 hours you will receive an email confirming your registration. You will now be able to log onto the site with your MAX ID.

For more information on how to utilize this new tool, you can download a copy of the  Benchmarks.gsa.gov User Guide.

Contract Awarded Labor Category Tool (CALC)

The CALC is a market research tool that searches a database of awarded Schedule contract prices for 48,000 labor categories from more than 5,000 Schedule contracts under the Professional Services Schedule. Rather than sifting through contract files or searching GSA Advantage!® for comparable pricing, Government contracting professionals can now use CALC to return a multitude of comparable contract prices within a matter of seconds. Additionally, these search results can be filtered by relevant criteria such as years of experience and education level. Over time, greater enhancements are anticipated, such as adding geographic filters.

CO Toolkit

The Contracting Officer Toolkit is a knowledge based, ready reference guide, developed by the Fall 2020 LEAP team in partnership with FAI. The CO Toolkit is intended to provide acquisition workforce members with a comprehensive set of links to policies, resources, training, certifications and communities of practice all in one place, in an easy to use format, Each heading will take you to the section with relevant links for your use; each section provides a link to return to the top of the page.

COR Toolkit

The Contracting Officer’s Representative Toolkit is a knowledge base tool, developed and maintained via a partnership between FAI and the Spring 2020 Leadership Excellence in Acquisition Program (LEAP) Team, Leapin’ Lizards. The COR Toolkit is intended to provide acquisition workforce members with a comprehensive set of links to policies, resources, training and communities of practice all in one place, in an easy to use format, Each heading will take you to the section with relevant links for your use; each section provides a link to return to the top of the page.

Discovery

A market research platform for acquisition professionals that allows them to research government-wide service contracts, their data, and their awarded vendors. Through this tool, give users the means to answer their pre-award questions without needing to issue RFIs or search across the internet. 

Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative (FSSI)

FSSI solutions provide easy access to common procurement vehicles that offer:

  • Greater discounts as volume increases
  • Business intelligence
  • Best practice solutions

IT Acquisition Workforce Continuous Learning Tool

GSA’s IT Acquisition Workforce CL Tool makes it easy for any federal employee requiring CLPs to stay current towards their federal credential. This PDF is an inventory of readily accessible Watch, Read, or Listen format learning resources users may browse and click on directly for access to take in FAI CSOD. Check out our Demo Video of the Tool here

OASIS Price Estimating Tool

The Price Estimation Tool (PET), OASIS’ Estimating tool assists in the development of the labor portion of the independent government cost estimate (IGCE) for OASIS SB and OASIS task orders. 

Project InReach

Recognizing that communication is critical to a high performing workforce, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) launched a new campaign called Project InReach that’s all about you – the acquisition workforce! The campaign features the Acquisition Compass, a new resource on the Acquisition Gateway to help quickly find OFPP policies and resources.
Log into the Acquisition Gateway to review. OFPP InReach memo

Made in America FAR Case 2021-008 Decision Trees

On March 7, 2022, the FAR council published  FAR Rule 2021-008, which makes substantial changes to the implementation of the Buy American Act. The rule is effective on October 25, 2022 and generally does three things:
 

  1. Increases the “domestic content” threshold for items under the Buy American Act
  2. Provides a “fallback provision” so that certain items can qualify as “domestic” with a smaller content amount
  3. Provides an enhanced price preference for domestic items relative to foreign

Use the following decision trees to understand the changes and more (such as when to use the Buy American Act procedures vs. Trade Agreement Act). Review the  Federal Register Notice for complete details about the FAR case.

Contracting Professionals Smart Guide

The Contracting Professionals Smart Guide is organized into two sections: Contract Formation and Contract Administration. The tables link to the Activities and their corresponding flow charts. Each Activity contains three columns, identifying relevant tasks, related FAR references, and additional information. At the top of the first page, each Activity links to relevant FAI and DAU courses, related online tools (if applicable), and the corresponding flow charts, which provide a graphical representation of the tasks. Please click here to download the Complete Guide.

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