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Contract office readies its World Wide Web site for the upcoming peak season
Ten months into one of the largest and most complex set of computer contracts ever awarded, the National Institutes of Health is reading promising vital signs for the electronic shopping and ordering services of its Electronic Computer Store II program.
Last September NIH selected 45 prime contractors to participate in ECS II, a $2 billion program offering a wide array of computer equipment and services to federal agencies. Now, after protests and industry consolidation, the number of primes has stabilized at 47. The program had logged $127 million in sales as of May 8, the most recent date for which NIH published ECS II sales figures on its World Wide Web site.
After launching the Web-based ECS II Ordering System June 1, following months of delays, NIH's Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC) is prepping it for the last hot weeks of the buying season. Vendors had rejected earlier efforts that demanded they join a central purchasing system and submit regular catalog updates to NIH. Customer feedback after 170 orders has been positive overall, said Everett Carpenter, NITAAC's information technology manager and cocreator of the Web site along with Gaithersburg, Md., software designer Information Flow Inc.
"We looked at our financial data for last year, and 30 percent of the business we did was in the month of September," Carpenter said. "We're getting feedback from the customers and vendors [on] how to make the system. ..the best it can be when September rolls around."
With so many vendors to choose from, NIH designed the system to save customers the trouble of having to page through nearly four dozen company Web sites to find the products they want or to play telephone tag with sales representatives. Instead, customers go to the NITAAC site and request items they want from at least three vendors, then vendors post quotes to the closed-loop system.
When customers have reviewed the quotes, they pass them on to their contract shops, which handIe the evaluations and place the orders.
Because the system does not allow customers to place orders directly from the site, it falls short of a genuine electronic commerce (EC) solution. NIH doesn't have...