Welcome to the Air Force Institute of Technology

An Air Force Institute of Technology School of Systems and Logistics team of faculty and staff recently completed a multi-year acquisition project. The effort focused on reducing the lengthy cycle time required to get a courseware development effort under contract and begin development. This several-month procedure resulted in course sponsors attempting to find alternative contract vehicles to expedite the process. Unfortunately, many of the alternative contract vehicles were not specifically designed for courseware development, resulting in an unsatisfactory arrangement that left all involved parties frustrated. To solve the aforementioned problems, AFIT/LS decided to use a Blanket Purchase Agreement through a process of defining goals, exploring the parameters of a BPA, and executing the contract.

The team had several goals when preparing for the effort. The first goal was to streamline the amount of time it takes to get a company and the course sponsors under contract from months to weeks. Second, AFIT/LS needed to maintain the maximum possible amount of control on all courseware development efforts in order to ensure the best deliverable product to the student. The third goal focused on guaranteeing that all the standards of formal courseware design and development were met. Finally, the school needed to ensure that web-based courses were in compliance with Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and follow the program architecture included “Sharable Content Object Reference Model.” These goals simply could not be met using the traditional contract vehicles proposed by many of the sponsors. This resulted in the school beginning the exploration of using a BPA.

A BPA can be best explained as a contracting vehicle that satisfies recurring requirements, eliminates repetitive actions on individual orders, and allows the customer to use a streamlined ordering process. The BPA allowed AFIT/LS to retain the services of the five best producers of electronic and live instructional materials for the long term. One of the major hurdles was making certain that the BPA was sufficient for live course development and web-based type courses, and providing for the possibility of producing courses using other types of media.

The execution phase required a legal determination of “service vs. product,” which led the team to begin developing a realistic and detailed acquisition plan that included all of the various points of producing live courseware materials, web-based courses, and other types of media. The team submitted a Request for Information in January of 2007 and received an overwhelming 60 responses. From these initial 60 offers, the team narrowed the pool down to only small, disadvantaged 8a companies. After more than a year of work by two buyers, the request for proposal was released in October.

The AFIT/LS team moved to the ASC Decision Center to evaluate more than two dozen responses to the RFP. The evaluation team spent many hours thoroughly evaluating every proposal and sample courseware that was presented. The final decision document was completed just before the new year, and the contract awards were made in January 2008.