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procurement method and solicitation type used to award the contract being reported and should include drop-down selections for procurement method and solicitation type. For example, the FPDS contract action report would include a drop-down selection for CSO field as well as selections for other solicitation types such as request for proposal, request for quote, Broad Agency Announcement, invitation for bid, and others. With the addition of the Solicitation Type reporting criterion, the government and future researchers will be able to analyze specifics about solicitation methodologies and the contract awards that follow in a manner similar to the analysis we conducted in this research. The inclusion of the Solicitation Type reporting criterion will also allow for the analysis of other areas that extend beyond the scope of our research, such as industry involvement across differing solicitation types, cost/ price history and modification metrics, small business participation across solicitation techniques, and targeted areas to bolster training in solicitation types. Absent a dedicated field to report solicitation type, we recommend the action description field be modified to enable reporting of the solicitation type, which would still present opportunities for future reporting, analysis, and informed decision making. The second modification we recommend to the FPDS contract action report is the inclusion of Initial Proposal Receipt Date as a reporting criterion. This new field should be a date field, which reports the date the initial proposal was received for all new awards being reported into the FPDS. The FPDS contract action report currently includes a field to report the solicitation date; however, this is not necessarily a useful data point for general solicitations, which can be open for long periods of time and which can invite multiple proposals during its open period(s). Absent this modification to the FPDS, there is no discernible means to distinguish the procurement lead times between a contract action where the proposal was received one day after the CSO was issued, and a contract action where the proposal was received one year after the CSO was issued. The addition of proposal receipt reporting will enable future analysis of procurement lead time for both contracts awarded from CSO solicitations and those awarded by other means.
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Defense ARJ , Spring 2025, Vol. 32 No. 1
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