JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-FORT SAM HOUSTON, Texas (Oct. 9, 2024) – When the dust settled on the rush to close out fiscal year contracts by midnight on Sept. 30, acquisition professionals throughout the Mission and Installation Contracting Command estimate that over 22,000 contract actions valued at nearly $5.5 billion across the Army, including $3 billion to American small businesses, were executed throughout fiscal year 2024.
The MICC also administered nearly 366,000 Government Purchase Card transactions by cardholders across the Army valued at an additional $567 million during fiscal year 2024.
The combined effect ensures Army installation readiness requirements across the continental U.S. and Puerto Rico meet the needs of Soldiers and their families during the federal government’s fiscal year, which runs from the first day of October in a given calendar year to the last day of September of the next calendar year. MICC’s contracting professionals and support staff work with their mission partners and resource managers to ensure all contract appropriations are obligated by midnight, eastern time, on the last day of each fiscal year. Any contracts not obligated on time are subject to budget appropriations in the next fiscal year and may not be funded.
Col. Freddy Adams, who assumed command of the MICC in June said MICC contracts ensure the Army acquires equipment, supplies and services vital to the U.S. Army mission, that improve the quality of life for Soldiers and their families.
“Our mission and industry partners and support staff enable our contracting professionals to research, craft, execute and maintain oversight of high-quality, effective contracts –empowering our Soldiers to win every day,” Adams said.
MICC collaborates with 29 customer teams and resource managers, supported by 30 contracting offices to facilitate and provide oversight for Army contracts that are vital to feed more than 200,000 Soldiers every day, to provide daily base operations support services at installations in countless ways, to prepare more than 100,000 conventional force members annually, to facilitate training for more than 100,000 students each year, and to maintain more than 14.4 million acres of land and 170,000 structures.
MICC’s mission partners include Installation Management Command, Training and Doctrine Command, Army Reserve Command, Army Forces Command, Army Sustainment Command and Army Test and Evaluation Command.
Adams thanked MICC’s mission partners for highlighting facility, equipment, training and service areas that may be improved throughout the Army through strategically implemented contracts.
“Thank you for your due diligence in determining requirements so we can effectively fulfill those needs,” Adams said. “Quite simply, with your continued support, the MICC excels at delivering the power of Army contracting and will continue to do so as we charge into fiscal year 2025.”
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The MICC is a major subordinate command of the U.S. Army Contracting Command. With a wealth of contracting expertise, MICC professionals are dedicated to providing the highest quality of contracting support to all of their mission partners, whenever and wherever needed. The responsive contracting solutions and oversight provided by the command serve as a force multiplier in ensuring the Army is ready to fight and win.
John Campos is the chief of the business management division within MICC’s contracting operations directorate, or CONOPs. His team is charged with facilitating a series of virtual in-progress review meetings, affectionately referred to as the war room, to ensure MICC customers and contracting professionals have the support and resources they need to forecast and achieve their fiscal year obligations.
“The war room was established over 10 years ago primarily to bring insight into our customers' requirements,” Campos said. The transparency that the recurring meetings provide ensure the units are able to forecast with certainty that each of their contracts will be obligated in the current year so that they can accurately report the status of those obligations to the Army Budget Office. “At least 14 of our primary customers, or mission partners, are integrated in our war room operations on a weekly basis throughout the fourth quarter.”
As part of the MICC war room’s weekly operations, Campos’ team sends detailed reports to the MICC command team, two contracting brigade commanders, and directors of two field directorate offices to provide them with situational awareness on the approximate workload remaining for their general series 1102 contracting and acquisition personnel, progress reviews for obligating current year funds and an analysis of at-risk contracting actions.
“Our mission partners report, and we track, many data points that are required to accurately project the big picture during close out to include 1102 workload, any outstanding concerns, actions that are at risk of not being obligated and overall obligation rates by customer,” Campos explained. “This visibility on open contracting actions allows leaders and decision makers to cross-level workload between offices, the brigades or the field offices.”
Without timely information, funded requirements may be at risk of not being awarded and organizations may lose funding. “We help leaders address at risk actions immediately so that we have ample time to execute, and course correct before the fiscal year end,” Campos concluded.
In fiscal year 2024, the MICC war room’s tracking and reporting ability was streamlined by an application the CONOPS team implemented earlier in the year. The Contract Lifecycle Management, or CLM tool, is a Microsoft Teams-based resource created with Microsoft Power BI that connects to various contracting data sources to help visualize and analyze data, making it easier for the contracting workforce to track and manage workload by creating interactive dashboards and custom reports.
Renee Burek, a senior procurement analyst who serves as co-lead of the war room, has been in CONOPs since 2017. “My best advice to our customers this year was to rely on the war room team for advice and fully commit to using tools like the Virtual Contract Enterprise Paperless Contract File application and the Contract Lifecycle Management tool that we launched in March of this year.”
She credits program analysts Victor Trujillo and Kevin Sablan with developing and training customers on the CLM tool. “Victor and Kevin worked hard to visualize the data in a way that would allow the user to make informed decisions,” Burek said. “Ultimately, their collaboration provided an invaluable resource to the workforce, so contract management and reporting is now more efficient and productive.”
In the partnership, Trujillo developed the datasets and automated how users update the source data in the CLM while Sablan was lead on the interactive content within CLM and formatting the reports leaders receive by email, ensuring they were user-friendly.
Before Trujillo joined the CONOPs team at the MICC headquarters in 2022 he was part of the contracting representative team at the 418th Contracting Support Brigade that had the arduous and cumbersome task of gathering end of year information and presenting it back to the war room each year. After he was able to observe end of year operations in 2023 from the headquarters’ perspective, Trujillo committed to automate the process for the benefit of the war room staff and the MICC’s customer users.
“We took information going from our financial systems to our contract writing systems and all the other ancillary systems that information is fed into, and we pulled all that information together and we presented it in one single location,” Trujillo said. “The CLM has actually freed up a lot of our time and our customers’ time for analyzing information rather than gathering information.”
Feedback from CLM users has been equally positive. Jim Clift, the chief of CONOPS for the 418th Contracting Support Brigade headquartered at Fort Cavazos, Texas, said end of year operations were enhanced exponentially in fiscal year 2024 with the advent of the CLM tool.
“CLM proved to be an invaluable tool for tracking acquisition team workload, offering real-time insights and visual clarity that transformed the General Fund Enterprise Business System, Procurement Desktop-Defense, Federal Procurement Data System and raw data from the VCE-PCF suite of web-based contracting tools into actionable information,” Clift said. “Victor Trujillo, who developed the CLM, was extremely responsive to improving the tool based on user feedback, and through his efforts, the 418th CSB and the mission partners we support, significantly reduced touch labor on many actions during the procurement action lead time.”
He said the CLM is also the first tool to effectively combine pre- and post-award actions with contracting officer warrant data.
“This empowered the brigade leadership to make data-driven decisions with greater confidence and to reallocate resources where needed to improve overall efficiency.”
Adams, who led several contracting organizations throughout his 26-year career, said he is proud of the innovations the CONOPS team is making in support of their mission partners and the brigade and field directorate leadership teams as they navigate end of year operations and begin fiscal year 2025.
Besides CLM, the team, in coordination with MICC Fort Drum, is developing another Microsoft Teams tool they expect to launch in the next few months. When active, the new tool will allow MICC’s mission partners to request quotes from vendors with a single synopsis document, thereby significantly expediting and simplifying the current buying process.
“The CLM is just one way the MICC is meeting the Army’s challenge to continuously transform and innovate our processes, ensuring our workforce and our customers have flexibility and foresight to meet emerging needs and future requirements,” Adams said. “We owe it to ourselves and our mission partners to habitually and purposefully seek other cost- and time-saving measures to eliminate inefficiencies, enabling the MICC to deliver the full power of Army contracting whenever and wherever we are needed.”
For more information about the Mission and Installation Contracting Command visit https://www.army.mil/micc.
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