The Army Contract Writing System Capabilities Management Office announced the approval of a material development decision for the Army Contract Writing System.
Heidi Shyu, acquisition executive and assistant secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, approved the MDD May 15. The approval allows the Army, under Product Manager Army Contract Writing System and sponsored by the deputy assistant secretary of the Army for Procurement, to move forward in pursuing a single, enterprise-wide system to support the full breadth of contract writing and management processes. The overall strategic goal is to replace the existing Army contract writing systems, the Standard Procurement System and the Procurement Automated Data and Document System, and subsume the Virtual Contracting Enterprise functionality.
"Congratulations to the entire ACWS Team for getting this program out of the starting gate and on our way to success," said Brig. Gen. Ted Harrison, commanding general, Army Contracting Command. "This has been an incredible effort and all of you should be extremely proud of your accomplishments to date. I look forward to supporting this effort and seeing Army Contracting Command, and indeed, the entire Army, reap the benefits of your hard work."
In October 2011, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics signed a memo mandating the services to discontinue use of the current joint Department of Defense contract writing system, the Standard Procurement System, by the end of fiscal year 2015. The memo cited the department-wide system developed in the mid-1990s as difficult to maintain and improve and as technologically fragile.
In response to the SPS sunset memo, with the approval from ASA(ALT), the Army established a formal product manager under the U.S. Army Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems as the material developer of the proposed system. In conjunction with that action, DASA(P) appointed ACC to act as the lead agent for the ACWS and to establish and staff a contracting capabilities management office on behalf of the Army contracting enterprise. In September 2012, the CMO officially stood up with the bottom line mission to act as the end-users' advocate and function as the capabilities developer to elicit, curate, and refine a set of unified functional requirements for the ACWS.
This MDD approval culminates more than 18 months of collaborative effort between the PM ACWS, DASA(P) Enterprise Business Systems Directorate, the ACWS CMO and several key business stakeholders in order to reach this major acquisition milestone.
The next step for ACWS will be to release a draft request for proposals in order to notify potential vendors the Army is looking to procure a commercially available off-the-shelf system to support contract writing and management process and meet the Army's current and future end-to-end contracting operational requirements.
Additional information about functional requirements for ACWS can be obtained from the ACWS CMO SharePoint site, https://acc.aep.army.mil/G6/cmo. The CMO will also continue to keep the field updated on the CMO's progress and involvement with ACWS.
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