Government Contracting Blog

As the federal government is the largest buyer of goods and services in the world, opening a channel for government business is a popular and potentially lucrative strategy. For many, the General Services Administration (GSA) Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) Program is the channel they elect to pursue. With its massive scope of goods and services and large pool of participating vendors, it’s the largest government contract vehicle in terms of sales, ever.

The General Services Administration (GSA) Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) Program receives regular updates throughout the year by GSA, and this year the changes have been major. As is, it’s already easy for federal contractors to get behind on the changes that come through the several recent Solicitation Refreshes. In combination with other common misconceptions surrounding the MAS Program, existing vendors and prospective vendors alike may have a hard time parsing old from new, and myth from fact. Here, we’ll clarify both old and new misconceptions that cause some of the most confusion for MAS contractors and prospective contractors.

Upon award of your Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) contract, you’re likely to be greeted with many tasks and terms you’ll need to get familiar with quickly. Sales reporting, Minimum sales requirement, Order Level Materials Special Item Number (SIN), Mass Modification—these are all terms that might get thrown around by your Contract Specialist during the award process. But what do they actually mean for you? What action items need to get done following the award of a General Services Administration (GSA) MAS contract? As a proposal writer that manages the post award process on a regular basis, I’ll let you know the best way I’ve found to get started on managing your GSA MAS contract.

The process of getting a contract on the Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) program can be daunting, typically taking months to complete. The items required to submit with a complete Schedule offer are expansive, ranging from your company’s financial statements, to its quality control procedures, to its commercial sales practices (an expanded list of the base requirements of a GSA Schedule offer can be found in our blog).

The Information Technology Large Category within the Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) accounts for the highest spending through MAS regularly, but it can also be one of the most difficult categories for vendors to determine where their offerings fall. Many of the Special Item Numbers (SINs) in this Large Category are interrelated, and sometimes the scope descriptions struggle to capture innovations in industry.

If you’re in the federal contracting world, you probably have some familiarity with small business set-asides and the various socioeconomic types of small businesses that the government is concerned with. Small business set-asides influence every type of federal acquisition strategy, including purchases made off of GSA’s Multiple Award Schedule (MAS), and other government-wide acquisition contracts.