CACI wins, then loses IED contract
By
Nick Wakeman
CACI International has lost an incumbent contract just two months after thinking it had won the work for analytical support services in the battle against improvised explosive devices.
CACI International has found itself on the losing end of a contract it thought it had won.
The company captured a contract with the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization in July to provide analytical support such as mission training, readiness exercises, and geospatial and operational analysis.
The contract was worth $12.6 million, and CACI was the incumbent on the predecessor contract valued at $24.3 million.
But the new contract was protested by Lanmark Technologies, a small, woman-owned business that does analytics work, and the protest led the Defense Department to pull back the award.
DOD has now awarded the contract to Lanmark, and CACI International has filed a protest of its own. A decision from the Government Accountability Office is expected by Jan. 15.
A couple things stick out to me about this protest, and they might not bode well for CACI.
First, CACI won the contract on July 30. Lanmark filed its protest Aug. 11. The Defense Department quickly took its corrective action, which led GAO to dismiss the protest by Aug. 29.
That’s 22 days from the time CACI won the contract to the time the Defense Department took it away.
That says to me that DOD saw something in Lanmark’s protest that led it to believe it had made a serious mistake, so it had to act.
By Sept. 29, with the year-end rush of fiscal 2014, the Defense Department made the award to Lanmark.
That rapid turnaround from award to pull back to new award makes me think that CACI might have a tough time getting this contract back.
It’s also interesting to note that 10 companies bid on the contract, but only CACI and Lanmark are involved in the awards and the protests.
While the total dollar value isn’t huge, battling improvised explosive devices is a high priority, so having this contract is about more than the dollar signs involved. This is work that is of critical importance to the customer.
For CACI, there also is the importance of hanging onto incumbent work, especially in a market that is still relatively flat.
We’ll have to see where this bid protest moves forward from here.