The Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) encourages all companies to do business with the U.S. Government. In order to empower businesses, The Office of Acquisitions Management, Contracts and Grants (AMCG) created its 2012 Small Business Strategic Plan. The Strategic Plan, while focusing on small businesses, creates a mentor-like environment for all businesses that wish to do business with the ASPR by providing templates for communication; holding outreach events/conferences; and highlighting internal Health and Human Services (HHS) policies, programs, and educational courses that all add value to our business partners.
The ASPR Business Toolkit
The ASPR Business Toolkit provides templates and a step-by-step guide to help companies navigate the contracting process. ASPR Business Toolkit provides examples for companies that are new to developing project plans and proposals intended for product development. This step by step guide includes various documents that could be required in responding to a solicitation.
Learn More >>
BARDA Industry Day
To facilitate transparency with ASPR and inform business of ASPR priorities, business practices, and its future endeavors, AMCG co-sponsors the BARDA Industry Day conferences with the Office of Biomedical Advanced Research and Development (BARDA). These conferences:
- Introduce BARDA programs, strategy, goals, and areas of interest;
- Explain core services that BARDA provides to support product development; and
- Announce new initiatives designed to address the challenges associated with developing medical countermeasures.
Additionally, AMCG includes an interactive workshop on the U.S. Government Contracting Process, to engage and encourage both current and future contractors, small and large, to do business with ASPR by providing participants insight into how the U.S. Government determines and establishes its requirements, develops solicitations, evaluates proposals, issues awards, and administers contracts through an interactive experience.
Learn More >>
Focusing Internal Policies, Programs, and Educational Courses
Within ASPR, there are many internal policies, programs, and educational courses in place that impact industry directly. AMCG believes that tracking of procurements and contract management will further improve the process, and allow greater transparency between industry and ASPR. The Pre-Award Timeline information system was designed to provide metrics to monitor acquisition processes and their associated time to completion, with delineation of the responsible parties. This tool captures the length of time it takes ASPR to complete pre-award tasks to properly award a contract. The metrics captured from the tool focus on the areas of potential concern; the Pre-Award Timeline tool is capable of tracking variance and notifying management of schedule delays. Since the implementation of the tool in 2011, procurement lead times have decreased.
Although pre-award metrics are vital to procurement timelines, AMCG and BARDA also recognize the strategic value in overarching acquisition oversight after contract award. ASPR’s Acquisition Management System became official ASPR policy in 2010 and was a finalist in the 2011
HHSinnovates Program. This policy and associated guidance provides a check-and-balance framework that fosters communication between all Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) stakeholders. By providing a venue for program evaluation and management, contractor performance can be evaluated in a consistent and fair manner.
In addition to ASPR’s Acquisition Management System, ASPR has implemented Earned Value Management. Earned Value Management is a program management tool, technique, and discipline that facilitates systematic planning for and monitoring of high value and complex projects. EVM helps to keep projects on schedule and within budget by integrating a project’s scope of work with the related budget and schedule to permit detailed assessment of overall performance during the life of the project.
ASPR’s newest and most exciting education program, The ASPR Medical Acquisition Course, is a training that provides a functionally diverse audience with hands-on experience integrating required specialties into a sound medical acquisition program that meets unique ASPR needs. It draws directly from certified, proven, and effective training material which has been reviewed by government and industry experts. While not available to industry representatives, the course’s main benefit is to address the unique training and Project/Program Management requirements to government employees for biomedical advanced research and development procurements.
Coming Soon: The ASPR Business Portal
ASPR plans to launch the ASPR Business Portal within PHE.gov. The ASPR Business Portal will establish better insight into the acquisition process, and all things associated with doing business with the ASPR. This portal will allow us to provide widespread access to information such as documents, solicitations, conference announcements, templates, and policy alerts, that may not be readily available to current and future U.S. Government Contractors.
The ASPR Business Portal will also house ASPR’s soon-to-come white paper electronic submission process. By converting this process to electronic submission, we will lessen the administrative burden on both small and large businesses. The electronic submission process will also improve internal reviews, causing a reduction in review times and increase ASPR’s ability to inform offerors of their white paper status.
In its second phase, the ASPR Business Portal will provide a platform for the establishment of new business relationships by allowing industry professionals and other relevant groups to create profiles, search for teaming opportunities, and locate other members of the ASPR Business Portal community who are interested in medical countermeasures development.