Every day the men and women of the Mission and Installation Contracting Command continue to do amazing things for our supported military partners and Soldiers. Your work is truly instrumental in sustaining the readiness posture of our Army. In the fourth quarter of the fiscal year, it was your business advice and acumen when weighing in on contract vehicles and executing actions that allowed our customers to develop sound solutions for meeting a critical point with their operational budgets. Congratulations on successfully completing fiscal 2018! Members of our team understand that the Army must maximize the value of every dollar as we operate transparently and wisely use the resources to which we are entrusted.
As a team, we completed 30,245 contract actions valued at $4,993,700,452. In addition, we managed 519,256 Government Purchasing Card transactions valued at $736,427,282. Also noteworthy are the small business specialists' efforts as they met and exceeded all five of our small business goals with approximately $1.9 billion awarded to American small businesses. Again, the MICC surpassed the $5 billion threshold with a combined $5.7 billion effort supporting our customers, Soldiers and their families. Outstanding numbers, but what the numbers don't show are the long hours and selfless sacrifices made by our team to accomplish our vital mission. I cannot thank each of you enough for the tremendous support you give to the Army and our nation.
We've made great strides this fiscal year in our centers of excellence efforts as part of the MICC Readiness Initiative. MICC-Fort Sam Houston in Texas is now the center of excellence for full food services and dining facility attendants and will be the focal point for processing contract requirements packages submitted by Army customers throughout the nation. This is crucial to the Army as these contracts ensure the feeding of more than 200,000 Soldiers every day. As the center of excellence, it will execute all the pre-awards for full food service contracts, and now Army Sustainment Command officials asked us to look at accomplishing post-award administration for these contracts. Carl Cartwright, the executive director of the ASC Acquisition, Integration and Management Center, said, "the pre-award work the MICC accomplished for ASC food service contracts has been significant in ensuring we are getting more effective and efficient food service delivered at a reasonable cost across the enterprise."
As for the other centers of excellence, MICC-Fort Eustis in Virginia has been performing well with executing all knowledge management training contracts, MICC-Fort Hood in Texas has been taking care of contracts for the ranges and test centers, and MICC-Fort Knox in Kentucky has masterfully managed the knowledge management professional services contracts with pre- and post-award support.
We recently pilot tested the base operations contract at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, which marks another step forward in standardizing acquisitions for similar services. Officials from Fort Belvoir, the MICC headquarters and Installation Management Command teamed with industry representatives to develop a standardized performance work statement and evaluation criteria to serve as a template for contracting base operations enterprise wide.
Now we continue to analyze courses of actions to determine which centers of excellence will support all the facilities, maintenance and construction contracts. This is a critical step because approximately 40 percent of the MICC's workload is related to facilities, maintenance and construction. The intent is for the center of excellence to perform pre-award contract functions for facilities, maintenance and construction contracts with post-award administration going back to the installation.
The Army Contracting Command is determining its organizational structure to best support the Army Materiel Command Shape the Fight initiative, and it is too early to determine if and what impact that decision will have on our organizational structure. Shape the Fight intends to better align staff functions to operationalize output to the Army leaderships' priorities and combatant commander requirements. Everything we do as an organization must be focused on ensuring the Army is ready to fight tonight and win our nation's wars. I will fully support our higher headquarters' decisions once they are announced.
During my first year in command, I evaluated all our processes to enforce the Army's top priority of readiness. The MICC Readiness Initiative was implemented to achieve the highest level of success for the MICC, and it outlined my initial vision of how our command could be best postured to support that priority. After careful review and analysis recently, I have concluded that transferring a field directorate office to Fort Belvoir is not the optimal path forward for the MICC. Instead staffing for FDO-Fort Sam Houston will be revitalized to support its critical mission. Keeping FDO-Fort Sam Houston is the right strategic approach to integrate and synchronize operational contracting support for its customers
Fiscal 2019 is off to a great start as our government has an approved defense budget. Having a budget in the first quarter is a new but welcomed challenge for the MICC as now we should move our contracting actions to the left with our customers to work them earlier in the year instead of the second, third and fourth quarters. We haven't been able to do that in the past while operating from continuing resolutions. We need to shift the thinking in the MICC to planning throughout the year, which we haven't had the fortune to do in the last 10 years due to budgetary constraints. This changes our mission perspectives, but I am confident that our team will work with our customers to make this our best year yet.
In closing, I thank every MICC employee for all the dedication and professionalism to provide efficient and effective contracting solutions for our Army. I look forward to talking to everyone at the Nov. 20 MICC Town Hall.
Contracting for Soldiers! With honor!
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