Small-Business Opportunities With the Navy

Week 3 Assignment – Small-Business Opportunities With the Navy
Introduction
Imagine that you are the owner of a small floor refinishing business that provides a specialty coating product for ceramic tile and marble floors. There is no other local flooring business that provides this service. Having recently received a patent on your product, you are ready to expand your business by competing for Navy contracts at the local base, which is located a few miles away. The services you want to sell are the specialty coating, the application of the coating, and a regular maintenance schedule. Your company consists of you, one office assistant, and two production employees.

Note: You will be referencing this business throughout all three assignments for this course. Please use “First Name, Last Name, Inc.” as the name of your company throughout these assignments.

Instructions
Write a 3–4 page paper in which you do the following:

Develop your company’s acquisition and planning strategy for obtaining a contract.

Analyze the manner in which utilizing The GSA SmartPay Program or a similar program in electronic contracting will assist your company and the Navy. (https://smartpay.gsa.gov/content/about-gsa-smartpay#sa26)
Provide a rationale for your response.

Go to the Strayer University Online Library to locate at least three quality references. Note: Wikipedia and other related websites do not qualify as academic resources. (https://eds.p.ebscohost.com/eds/search/basic?vid=0&sid=96686009-5144-4661-a06f-ce8494fb3f8d%40redis)

This course requires the use of Strayer Writing Standards. For assistance and information, please refer to the Strayer Writing Standards link in the left-hand menu of your course. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.

The specific course learning outcome associated with this assignment is:

Create an acquisition and planning strategy that uses an electronic contracting program to assist a company in obtaining a contract.

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ANSWER

Question 1: Develop your company’s acquisition and planning strategy for obtaining a contract.

Step 1: Market Research

Acquisition planning and strategy provide business managers with a roadmap that maximizes their likelihood of meeting clients’ needs within the stipulated cost and schedule. The planning phase involves creating a multi-functional team, a strategy, and market research. The team will interview the clients and stakeholders and capture their needs, concerns, and priorities (Data Acquisition Unit, 1). This information will form the basis for the project requirements. Some questions to guide the market research include:

1. What are the needs and requirements of the potential contract?
2. What risks might develop in case of an acquisition?
3. Are these risks acceptable depending on the current firm status? If not, what is the maximum acceptable loss?
4. What are the emerging market trend, e.g., emerging technologies? Competition opportunities?
5. Can the firm make any improvements? If not, what metrics will guide performance evaluation?
6. What is the current business strategy for the contract?
7. How will the contract change the firm’s mission over time?

The FAR15.201 (c) (4) encourages face-to-face meetings with industry leaders. Typically, market research is conducted before making a solicitation for information (Data Acquisition Unit, 1). However, the FAR 15.201 (f) states that disclosing sensitive procurement information is a non-issue as long as the requirements are not defined (Data Acquisition Unit, 1). Therefore, the firm can have one-on-one meetings with the Navy’s leaders to solicit information.

The market research will focus on best practices, performance measures, and incentive programs to enhance outcomes. This approach can increase the number of potential solutions and help the organization establish an effective business relationship with a potential contractor (Data Acquisition Unit, 1). Once the market research is completed, a multi-functional team will review, validate, and document the market research results. The team will identify gaps between current business practices and what the potential clients demand. The team will also address funding issues, e.g., when budget requirements significantly exceed the existing budget.

Step 2: Risk and Design Considerations

Risk analysis is a continuous process that entails examining the possibility of a risk occurring, determining an impact, isolating the cause, and creating a mitigation plan. Examples of risks include business, technical, funding, process, and organizational risks. Conducting this risk analysis is imperative because it will help the firm estimate the risk of failing to meet the Navy’s design. Therefore, it must analyze its manufacturing and program design capabilities to meet the Navy’s quality requirements and planned schedule and cost.

Step 3: Preparing a Solicited Proposal

The information obtained from the market research will help the firm determine what aspect of the service is important to the client. It will also help determine whether the firm need more than one contracting officer and which contract type is the best. This information will be included in the proposal to demonstrate to the Navy that the firm can meet its requirements.

Step 4: Submitting an Institutional Letter

Sometimes, firms may be asked for an institutional support letter (Data Acquisition Unit, 1). In such cases, the firm has the opportunity to highlight what contributions the firm will make to the Navy. The letter will reinforce key characteristics of the proposal and the key value proposition, emphasizing the firm’s leadership strengths, its cutting-edge approach, and the team’s expertise and capabilities. The firm will align these strengths with the Navy’s vision and mission.

Step 5: Choosing a Negotiator

The firm’s CEO can delegate this role to an expert negotiator responsible to review any agreements between the firm and the Navy. Both parties need to work together to ensure accountability, internal consultations, compliance with local and federal regulatory bodies, and protection of individual interests. The expert negotiator will ensure all contract processes are in the firm’s best interests and conform to internal policies.

Question 2: Analyze how utilizing The GSA SmartPay Program or a similar program in electronic contracting will assist your company and the Navy.

Electronic contracting is a process that entails creating contracts over the internet or computer networks. Modern business processes require speed and flexibility to keep up with the dynamic market, explaining why the traditional contracting processes gradually become inefficient and ineffective. Electronic contracting provides businesses with low-level contract automation, allowing them keep up with the ever-changing legal requirements.

The GSA SmartPay payment is an example of such e-solutions that can facilitate business-business electronic contracting. Palmer (2) conducted a study to determine the impact of government card technology on cost, quality, and time. The authors revealed that card technology helped the U.S. government make significant cost savings, potentially billions (Palmer, 2). This study implies that the firm and the Navy can reap such cost savings when using the GSA SmartPay payment solution to process transactions. The electronic approach will eliminate the need for paperwork, e.g., payment invoices, requisition, and purchase orders, resulting in the cost savings mentioned above. Because the transactions are electronic, it will take less time to process the paperwork transactions. Palmer (2) also indicates that these electronic purchase cards can reduce the transaction processing time by two to six weeks. Using the GSA SmartPay will improve our transactions’ efficiency, resulting in significant cost savings.

Palmer (2) also revealed that the military (Navy, Air Force, & Department of Defense) accounts for 31% of all GSA’s purchase cardholders, 37% of card transactions, and 42% of all GSA card spending. By adopting the GSA card, the firm will be aligning its core processes and activities with its clients’ processes. The firm can use alignment as a core value proposition to the Navy. One author stated that “the key to unlocking the full potential of supply chain management (SCM) technologies is achieving interoperability across participating records systems and networks” (Henninger, 3, 1). Interoperability refers to technological systems seamlessly sharing data because they are compatible.

Thanks to globalization, modern logistics and supply chains are more complicated and demanding than ever before. This globalization requires supply chains to become interconnected and interdependent for collaboration, including vertical and horizontal cooperation. For supply networks to be interdependent, their systems must also be interoperable (Henninger, 3). In this context, interoperability refers to the ability of supply networks to utilize other networks’ functionality or to execute operations via a shared network mutually. Henninger (3) indicates that businesses must ensure interoperability at the organizational, business, and digital levels to achieve their supply chain’s full potential.

The firm and the Navy can achieve this interoperability by sharing the same system software (GSA SmartPay Payment Solution). By doing so, the organization will be able to exchange value or information (Pan, 4). For example, the GSA software can generate a history of business transactions. These business records lay down a factual foundation for business activities; hence, they can provide evidence for a signed business contract. These records will also help the two companies identify issues, e.g., financial discrepancies, across the supply chain, promoting business integrity. The firm and the Navy can achieve interoperability by using the same software: the GSA SmartPay Payment Solution. Consequently, they will be able to share data and information, improving their business activities seamlessly.

References

Data Acquisition Unit. No date. Acquisition Strategy | Adaptive Acquisition Framework. Aaf.dau.edu. Retrieved May 14, 2022, from https://aaf.dau.edu/aaf/services/step5/

Richard Palmer. February 14, 2022. Implementing card technology in government: different approaches, different outcomes. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/TG-10-2020-0302/full/html.

Annegret Henninger. May 31, 2021. Distributed Interoperable Records: The Key to Better Supply Chain Management. https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/computers/computers-10-00089/article_deploy/computers-10-00089.pdf?version=1626688420.

Shenle Pan. March 2021. Digital interoperability in logistics and supply chain management: state-of-the-art and research avenues towards Physical Internet. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349819121_Digital_interoperability_in_logistics_and_supply_chain_management_state-of-the-art_and_research_avenues_towards_Physical_Internet.

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