On November 27, the General Services Administration (GSA) announced a plan to consolidate the 24 Multiple Award Schedules (MAS), aka Federal Supply Schedules aka GSA Schedules, available to Federal contractors into a single, unified schedule. This consolidation should (in theory) make life easier for Federal purchases, reduce the administrative burden on contractors who hold multiple MAS, and decrease the amount of oversight GSA is required to perform over schedule holders.

At this point, details on how exactly all of this will work are slim, but more information should be coming soon. On December 12, GSA will hold a Federal Marketplace Industry Day where GSA will discuss its MAS consolidation plans and its overall Federal Marketplace Initiative, a strategy to “deliver a fully-reimagined, end-to-end experience designed to facilitate better, faster mission-driven acquisitions across government.” If they could somehow have worked “disrupt”, “synergy”, and “paradigm” into that sentence, they would have completed a buzzword bingo. Oh well, opportunity missed!

Jokes aside, this has the potential to save a lot of people a lot of time and energy, both on the industry side and the government side. My general impression (unsupported by any real data) is that people were generally happy with the consolidation of the old Mission Oriented Business Integrated Services (MOBIS), Financial and Business Solutions (FABS), Professional Engineering Services (PES), Logistics Worldwide (Logworld), and other schedules into the Professional Services Schedule (PSS) aka 00CORP. Of course, the devil is in the details, and it will be interesting to see how GSA plans to handle migration and merger of the schedules, how contract terms and labor categories/pricing will be impacted, what will happen with the Industrial Funding Fee (IFF), and many, many other issues. But overall this kinda, sorta makes sense! Now it’s up to GSA to make sure that rollout and implementation goes smoothly.

The registration limit has been reached for the upcoming Industry Day, but instructions for virtual attendance can be found here. The Industry Day agenda can be downloaded here.