Small business is good business for the federal government.
And that's why meeting small business performance goals is important to Congress, the Army, the Army Materiel Command and, consequently, the Aviation and Missile Command.
Each year, the Army, in support of Congressional mandates, assigns small business performance goals to AMC, which then assigns similar goals to its major subordinate commands. These small business goals relate to all aspects of the small business contracting world, including disadvantaged businesses and women-owned businesses.
Currently, the AMCOM small business goal is 11 percent; whereas, the goal for small disadvantaged business is 5 percent, for women-owned small business is 1 percent, for service disabled veteran owned small business is .60 percent, and for HUBZone is .05 percent.
"AMCOM obligates more than 50 percent of all AMC contracting dollars, so it is important that AMCOM meets its annual small business goals," said Todd Couch of the AMCOM Small Business Office.
"It has been said that if AMCOM does not meet its goals, AMC won't meet their goals; and if AMC does not meet their goals, the Army won't meet theirs."
AMCOM reports their goal performance to AMC commander Gen. Dennis Via weekly. Via can be heard at most speaking engagements to industry saying that "Small Business is Big Business," especially at AMC.
AMCOM has been sensitive to goal performance and the transparency of goaling since it began collecting the goal performance statistics back in 1988, Couch said. Recognizing the importance of small businesses to the economy, Congress established a series of programs to assist small businesses competing for federal contracts. It did so because the use of small businesses as contractors is "in the interest of maintaining and mobilizing the nation's full productive capacity, in the interest of war or national defense programs, and in the interest of assuring that a fair portion of the total purchases and contracts for property and services for Government in each industry category are placed with small business concerns."
To achieve these aims, the law establishes a series of goals.
There are three types of goals: numerical goals, industrial goals and maximum practicable utilization. The most commonly recognized of these goals are the numerical goals and of those the prime contracting goals are the most prominent. The Small Business Act of 1953 sets out the policy objective that small businesses receive a "fair proportion of the total purchases" of the federal government. Decades later, Congress established quantitative national goals for small-business procurement. Section 15(g) of the Act requires that the federal government have a government-wide goal of awarding not less than 23 percent of the total value of all prime contracts for each fiscal year to small business concerns, 3 percent of prime contract dollars to service-disabled veteran owned small businesses, 3 percent to goal to HUBZone businesses, 5 percent to women-owned small businesses, and 5 percent to small disadvantaged businesses.
The Small Business Administration reports annually to Congress on small business accomplishments, which includes small business goal performance. In November 2015, the Congressional Committee, Small Business Subcommittee on Contracting and Workforce held a hearing titled, "Continuing Challenges for Small Contractors" as part of the Subcommittee's ongoing effort to improve the competitive viability of small business contractors.
It should be noted that small business goal performance is only attributed to prime contracts, not subcontracts, Couch said. Large businesses subcontract to small business, but at this time there is no tracking mechanism to collect this data. That means AMCOM is responsible to award a fair portion of prime contracts to small businesses.
does Army and SBA track small business goal performance? There is a contracting system called Federal Procurement Data System -- Next Generation (FPDS-NG), most notably called Contract Action Report (CAR). The report shows the total number of eligible small business actions (awarded to large and small businesses), total eligible small business dollars (obligated to large and small businesses), and total small business actions and small business obligations. The mathematics is simple -- divide the total small business dollars by the total eligible small business dollars to get the goal percentage. Since the dollar figures come straight from FPDS-NG, there is no means to manipulate the goal performance numbers. AMCOM tracks goal performance by buying activity DoDAAC. The contracting DoDAACs for AMCOM are: W911N2 (Letterkenny Army Depot, W911W6 (Aviation Development Directorate), W912NW (Corpus Christi Army Depot), W31P4Q (PEO Missiles and Space), W58RGZ (PEO Aviation), and W9124P (Redstone Arsenal Base Operations).
If your AMCOM organization has a contract with one or more of these numbers, its goal performance is being tracked against AMCOM HQs goal achievement and being reported weekly to AMC. Please know that each buying activity's DoDAAC gets assigned individual goals by AMCOM at the beginning of each calendar year, and the goal is set by averaging goal performance over a three-year period.
AMCOM in recent years has not met their small business socio-economic goals, Couch said.
"It is prudent that AMCOM buying activities and the contracting activity look to awarding to small businesses first, before awarding or contemplating award to a large business," he said. "By working together for small business goal achievement, we will show the Army that small business is big business at AMCOM."
Editor's Note: AMCOM employees needing additional information, can contact Todd Couch at jesse.t.couch.civ@mail.mil .
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