Army chooses bundling to recompete billions in professional services, IT vehicles

The Army will move ahead with its plan to bring together the recompetes for two of its major go-to contract vehicles for professional and IT-centric services.

Known as MAPS, the future Marketplace for the Acquisition of Professional Services contract is poised to become the Army's primary vehicle for acquiring staff augmentation and technology support from industry.

Army leaders are working to schedule an industry day to discuss its plans for MAPS before the current federal fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, the branch said in a Monday update.

MAPS is the new name for what the Army previously called ACCESS back in April, when the service branch first unveiled its plan to bundle requirements from the current Responsive Strategic Services Sourcing and Information Technology Enterprise Solution-3 Services vehicles.

Approximately $10 billion in combined obligations have flowed through RS3 and ITES-3S since the former was awarded in the 2017-to-2019 timeframe and the latter was opened for business in 2018. Both vehicles' ceilings add up to $49.4 billion with RS3's at $37.4 billion and ITES-3S' at $12 billion.

It is far too early in the ACCESS acquisition cycle to know the maximum value, but the spending and ceiling figures leave us certain that another multibillion-dollar procurement is under construction.

ACCESS was originally intended to be the successor to RS3 until service branch leaders decided to go down the consolidation path, while the future ITES-4S recompete's process had started with a request for information in January.

RS3 was awarded over multiple rounds in the 2017-to-2019 timeframe and is scheduled to expire in May 2027. ITES-3S is scheduled to sunset in September 2027.

The larger MAPS procurement would cover work areas such as engineering; research, development, test and evaluation; logistics; acquisition and strategic planning; education and training; medical-based logistical services; and IT services.

A total of 260 companies are currently involved in the RS3 vehicle that has seen approximately 19% of its ceiling spent to-date, or $7 billion. GovTribe data lists those top five incumbents as MAG Aerospace, General Dynamics, CACI International, Booz Allen Hamilton and Leidos.

ITES-3S has 116 companies as primes and roughly 25% of its ceiling has been obligated to-date, or $2.9 billion. GovTribe data lists those top five incumbents as Science Applications International Corp., IBM, Agile Defense, Business Mission Edge and General Dynamics.