Annually, the U.S. federal government administers more than three million contracts totaling over $450 billion. Contract administration is a complex, detailed and highly regulated process.  

Contracting specialists’ days are too often consumed by contract administration and management rather than value-added actions such as negotiation, driving innovation, establishing strategies and proactive risk management. CSA’s team of experts developed technology-based productivity solutions to bring speed and agility to the contracting process and reduced manpower reliance for repetitive, routine tasks.

Challenge

Our client is a major federal program overseeing an enterprise IT portfolio for more than half-a-million users worldwide. Its contract team manages a large volume of claims processing and has year-round contract administration requirements.

Claims processing was conducted by manually verifying the negotiated status against the purchase order. Many requests took more than a year to be reviewed and approved with no ability to manage priority or correct sequencing of claims.  

There was no visibility into turnover rate or workflow of the contract approval process. Speed and order of approvals suffered, with many claims becoming lost in the system. This resulted in poor resource allocation, confusion and low processing rates.

In addition to missing metrics, basic processes for vendor submissions had never been established, increasing the workload for the contract specialists and extending the evaluation and award period.

Action

CSA’s initial task was to help manage the contracting process. After understanding the day-to-day requirements to keep the program office running smoothly, we were able to gain greater visibility into the overall process.

We leveraged existing tools and platforms to create a historical database of monthly claims. Implementing a comparative analysis technique, a baselined standard turnover time was identified and tracked a simple moving average. The reporting exposed where bottlenecks occurred so we could work efficiently and effectively.

Educated by metrics and process mapping, we identified an issue with the unstandardized vendor form submissions. The lack of standardization resulted in longer preprocessing of contract data.

To address this, we developed a supplemental tool to plug into the existing platform. Our tool helps expedite the claim process by separating contract types and applying initial cost analysis. It uses data from the original tool to automate metric reporting for further analysis.

400%

Increased rate of contract awards

$75M

In contracts awarded from end-to-end

Result

The client experienced seamless implementation and integration. After one year of use, the tool will have enough data to provide predictive data analytics.

Senior leadership now has visibility into the contracting process from end-to-end, enabling further continuous improvement.

By tracking documents to ensure a first-in, first-out policy, the issues of lost claims and poor priority were eliminated. These simple metrics empowered the contracting officers to shift resources and workload balance appropriately, increasing workflow and performance in excess of 400%.

Within the first nine months post launch, 1,700+ case records have been created and processed in the tool. It has led to the consolidation of several full-time equivalents resulting in cost savings and increased productivity. Overall, the client saw more than $75 million in contracts awarded from end-to-end.