$6B DLA IT contract clears protest hurdle

The Defense Logistics Agency has cleared a protest hurdle and can now move to awards for its $6 billion JETS contract.

Known as the J6 Enterprise Technology Services contract, DLA will use JETS to buy a wide range of IT services and tap technical and management expertise to support applications, software, hardware, infrastructure and systems.

The eight-year contract has 21 task areas including networks and telecommunications, technology, stakeholder integrated services and defense business system life-cycle management. Other areas include IT evaluations, budgets and costs, configuration management, systems engineering, virtual workforce training, information assurance and audit-readiness support.

Oakland Consulting Group filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office after it had been eliminated from the competitive range. Oakland is a small business based in Lanham, Md.

While a protest is pending, DLA could not make awards, but the way is clear now that GAO has rejected Oakland’s protest.

DLA is planning awards in three categories: unrestricted, small business and 8(a) small business.

JETS consolidates a number of contracts and supports a long list of DLA systems including Electronic Mall, Employee Activity Guide for Labor Entry (also known as EAGLE), Mapping Enterprise Business, Defense Travel System, and Acquisition Streamlining and Standardization Information System or ASSIST.

Oakland filed its protest after learning that DLA had evaluated its proposal as technically unacceptable, eliminating it from the competition. They also objected to DLA rating its partnering and strategic alliance evaluation factor as marginal.

DLA had dinged Oakland because it wasn’t detailed enough in how it described its solution in several areas. The agency said that the company was parroting back the requirements and not fully describing its approach.

After Oakland filed its protest, DLA filed its response with GAO. In Oakland’s response to DLA’s response, GAO found that Oakland didn’t adequately address issues DLA raised. Instead, Oakland primarily repeated its claims from its protest, GAO said.

“The agency responded to Oakland’s protest by providing a detailed explanation of its evaluation. Oakland, in turn, responded to the agency’s explanation by repeating--essentially verbatim--the statements made in its initial protest,” GAO said.

GAO denied Oakland’s protest on Sept. 19, but just released a public version of the decision. Because it has been over month since the decision was made, I think we can expect awards to be announcement almost any day now. We’ll keep an eye out for them.