Services Supply Chain in the Department of Defense: Drivers of Success in Services Acquisition
Abstract
Over the last few decades, services acquisition has continued to increase in scope and
dollars obligated. Contracting for services has grown in relation to systems contracting over
the last couple of decades and is the fastest growing procurement sector for the DoD. This
growth in dollars obligated has attracted increased political attention and scrutiny on an
already problematic defense contracting process. The DoD has responded to these problems
by improving services acquisition in several different ways, but even with these
improvements, services acquisition still has problems in the areas of procurement planning,
source selection, and contract administration. This research continues our ongoing
investigation in DoD services acquisition by exploring the determinants of contract success.
We use the DoD Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS) as a
proxy for contract success and determine if there are any relationships between contract
variables (type of service, contract dollar value, level of competition, contract type) and
contract success based on CPARS ratings (quality of product/service, schedule, cost control,
business relations, management of key personnel, and utilization of small business). Our
research findings revealed that contract dollar value and level of competition affected the
success of a service contract. The findings also revealed that the failure rate in CPARS was
lower than expected. Finally, we saw that as the percentage of 1102 filled billets increased,
the contract failure rate decreased. We also observed that as workload dollars per filled billet
increased, contractor performance ratings also increased, and thus contract failure ratings
decreased. From these findings, we present a discussion of the results and the managerial
implications.
Description
Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Acquisition Research Symposium, Thursday Sessions Volume II
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.NPS Report Number
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