GSA releases RFPs for $60B OASIS contract

The General Services Administration released the twin request for proposals on Thursday afternoon for the unrestricted and small business contracts collectively known as OASIS.

The acronym stands for the One Acquisition Solutions for Integrated Services and the procurement vehicle could be worth up to $60 billion over 10 years. The RFPs sets no maximum dollar ceiling for the contracts.

The contracts have a five-base and one five-year option, but because of OASIS’ structure an individual task order could stretch out for 15 years.

Bids for both the small business and unrestricted portions of OASIS are due Sept. 17. Awards could come in October with notices to proceed issued in January 2014, according to Deltek.

Award decisions under the contract will be made on a best value basis, according to the RFPs. The contracts are broken into seven pools according to different NAICS codes. GSA said it expects to make 40 awards in each pool. Theoretically, there would be 280 awards in the unrestricted contract and 280 awards in the small business contract.

Presumably, a single company could win contracts across multiple pools. The solicitation number for the unrestricted contract is GS00Q-13-DR-0001 and the number for the small business contract is GS00Q-13-DR-0002.

From its inception, OASIS has been described by GSA as a professional services contract and it has six core disciplines:

• Program management
• Management consulting
• Scientific
• Engineering
• Logistics
• Financial

The RFP gives detailed examples of services that would fall into each of those disciplines.

For example, under program management services it lists 34 different services including acquisition support, business intelligence, information analysis, capabilities integration and development and requirements management.

Cutting across each of the core disciplines are eight life cycle phases where agencies may need professional services support such as requirements analysis, concept development, planning, acquisition, research and development, test and evaluation, implementation, and operations and maintenance.

IT services are considered an ancillary support service and can only be acquired through OASIS if it is integral to completing a task develop under one the professional service based requirements within the scope of OASIS.

In its announcement of the release of the RFPs, GSA said OASIS is designed to reduce duplication of contract efforts across government and “provide federal agencies with comprehensive, integrated professional services contract options.”

Federal Acquisition Service Commissioner Tom Sharpe called it a “hybrid, government-wide acquisition vehicle that has great potential to reduce the number of full-and-open procurement across government and drive extraneous costs out of the acquisition process.”