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Small Businesses on GSA Schedule Contracts
In FY 2001, small businesses received approximately $43 billion in federal prime contracts. This represented 20% of all reported prime contract dollars. Did small businesses do A) Significantly worse B) Worse C) Better D) Significantly better on GSA Schedule contracts than they did with procurement overall?
Are GSA Schedule contracts living up to their potential as equalizers in the small- versus large-business competition for federal prime contract awards? As one of the key vehicles for streamlining federal procurements (reducing procurement lead times, acquisition costs, paperwork, etc.), Schedule contracts accounted for $12.6 billion in reported prime contract dollars in FY 2001. Did this help or hurt small businesses achieve the government's goal of awarding 23% of all prime contract dollars to small business? This question can be answered in under 60 seconds using FPC. Here's how:
Fire up the FY 2001 FPC application and clear all search criteria from your filter. Open up the Search dialog by clicking either the Search Wizard or Advanced Search button on the Active View Sidebar. Switch to the Contract group of fields and select the Kind of Contract Field. You want to search on Kind of Contract Code = G, for GSA Schedule awards and modifications. Either type the code into the search box or select the code off the Kind of Contract search index. Upon entering G, press Enter to queue up the hits and then click OK or Apply to activate the search and view the results.
There is one more step -- to answer the quiz you need to run your selected data through the Type of Business Rank Report. From any Active View Screen, click either the Report Wizard or Generate Reports buttons on the Sidebar. In the Print and Generate Report dialog, select Rank as your Report Type and Company as your Report Group. The very first option in the Available Reports list is the Business Type Rank Report. Highlight this this option, check the radio button next to Print Preview in the lower left portion of the dialog, then click OK to display the results. Remember: reports use data selected from your active filter -- you don't have to specify your selection criteria a second time.
If you checked the box in the previous Report Dialog to display a Report Title Page, the first page you see will be a description of the report. Click the right arrow button to move to the first page of data. In the Business Type Rank Report, you will see that small businesses are split between Business Type A, for Small/Disadvantaged firms, and Business Type B, for All Other small businesses. When you add up the percentages for both types of small business, you will find that together all small businesses accounted for 37% of all dollars spent on GSA Schedule Contracts in FY 2001. This is significantly higher than their 20% share of procurement overall, so the correct answer to this week's quiz is D.
As more small businesses apply for Schedule contracts, and as more agencies gain experience using Schedules to acquire needed goods and services, it appears Schedules will drive more business to small firms and help agencies achieve their small business contracting goals. Agencies need to dig beneath the surface of these numbers, however, to study whether GSA Schedules are contributing to two tiers of small businesses -- the very large and the very small. More on this next week.
Data supplied by Eagle Eye Publishers, Inc.
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