As a GSA Schedule contractor, you are given access to a variety of tools and platforms for advertising and selling to government buyers. Arguably, the most important of these is GSA Advantage!. Much in the way that you and I would purchase items from Amazon or shop online during Cyber Monday, Contracting Officers for government agencies access GSA Advantage! to browse the full catalog of contractors and their offerings. Even if you’ve already established consistent relationships with existing buyers, your public sector footprint could grow even larger with the aid of GSA Advantage!.

GSA Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) contracts have many compliance requirements to ensure that contractors provide products and services that align with federal procurement regulations. This fall, GSA renewed efforts to take action to remove non-compliant products from GSA contracts and GSA Advantage!. In the coming months, GSA will be removing items from a contractor’s Schedule if they are not in compliance with Trade Agreements Act (TAA) regulations, include prohibited hardware and telecommunications, as well as non-authorized refurbished items. Compliance with the terms and conditions of your Multiple Award Schedule is critical to the success of your contract, so let’s cover what you need to know about these non-compliant products.

The short answer is yes, you can participate in government bids without a GSA Schedule. However, it’s much more nuanced than that, and you can be missing out on huge opportunities within the federal marketplace. Open market sales to the federal government take much longer and can be more costly than sales through a government contracting vehicle, and other vehicles are not as flexible or available.

As a federal contractor, you may think you are well acquainted with the System for Award Management (SAM) platform. After all, contractors must keep an active registration in SAM.gov to be eligible for contracting opportunities from federal customers. To keep an active registration, you need to regularly, at least annually, update and renew your company’s SAM registration. However, since many contractors only login to SAM.gov once a year to complete this, you may be shocked by the number of changes to SAM.gov over the past year. As such, I will be going over some of these changes so that you are prepared the next time you log in to SAM.gov.

GSA has been developing a slew of Information Technology (IT)-related contracts recently from Polaris, to the Ascend Cloud Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) and now Alliant 3. GSA has recently released the draft Request for Proposal (RFP) for Alliant 3, one of the largest contracts in the works that will focus on the acquisition of advanced and emerging IT technologies. Alliant 3, a follow on from Alliant 2, will be a government-wide Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) Best-in-Class (BIC) contract, with an estimated ceiling of $75 billion. Since all questions and comments on the draft RFP are due on January 6, 2023, we’re going to cover what you need to know about this upcoming contract vehicle so your company can get involved early on.

As the pandemic lingers, the demand for goods and services continue to be a spending trend among government agencies. To respond to this crisis and other health-related emergencies, state and local governments are able to purchase items from GSA Schedules by participating in GSA’s Public Health Emergencies (PHE) Program. This program allows some non-federal entities to use the GSA Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) program for essential public health emergency supplies.