GSA Competitive Pricing – CALC Tool
The General Services Administration (GSA) has launched a new competitive pricing initiative aimed at identifying and addressing price variability across the Federal Supply Schedule (FSS) program. This will be accomplished with the help of two key pricing tools that help federal agencies make smarter, faster buying decisions by allowing contracting officers to easily determine the range of prices for a particular service labor category or product part number. The next several BH Sky blogs will address various aspects of this important initiative.
This blog focuses on the Contract Awarded Labor Category (CALC) tool, which allows agency contracting officers to perform research and price analysis for professional labor categories across a database of contract awarded prices for 48,000 labor categories from more than 5,000 recent GSA contracts.
What Is CALC?
CALC helps agency contracting officers determine the range of pricing for a specific labor category. For example, a search for “Senior Engineer” will return comparable labor categories and their rates, which can be further narrowed by filtering for associated criteria such as years of experience, education level, etc. CALC searches the awarded prices on several of GSA’s professional services schedules, including Mission Oriented Business Integrated Services (MOBIS), Environmental, Logistics Worldwide (LOGWORLD), Professional Engineering Schedule, Language, Advertising and Integrated Marketing Schedules (AIMS), and the Consolidated Schedule.
Before CALC, contracting officers had to sift through paper contracts or comb through GSA Advantage files to stitch together a picture of what a fair and reasonable hourly labor rates might be. CALC allows contracting officer to search a database of labor categories in seconds and returns up to hundreds of comparables providing a comparison of fair and reasonable pricing awarded at the contract level that the contracting officer can use to conduct market research.
About BH Sky
BH Sky Associates, based in Princeton, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., helps clients identify, negotiate, secure, market and manage procurement opportunities and contracts at federal, state, and local levels of government. It is New Jersey’s only company specializing in GSA/VA Schedule Contracts and Government Market Intelligence. BH Sky offers professional consulting services to small and mid-size companies in a wide range of industries seeking to do business with the government. For more information, view our videos or contact us directly by phone 866.468.7420 or email.