Potential Power of BUYSMARTER
BUYSMARTER will enable HHS to become "smarter buyers than the vendors are sellers," thus shifting the balance of power to the government for the first time.
Additionally, by leveraging a core team for the entirety of an enterprise-wide purchase, agency contracting resources, who previously would be tasked with completing agency specific buys, are now available to address higher order, mission-critical, and agency-specific acquisition work.
Figure 1: Leveraging HHS Purchase Power
Figure 2: BUYSMARTER Leverages the Collective Purchasing Power of HHS
A Success Story: BUYSMARTER Principles in Action
HHS consolidated 11 different contracts for Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) into one contract for the whole Department with Verizon that may result in approximately $700 million in savings and future cost avoidance over a 12 year period by leveraging the BUYSMARTER principles.
Overview
Prior to the enterprise-wide acquisition, HHS had 11 separate EIS contract opportunities for its 10 OPDIVs and the Office of the Secretary, all operating independently of each other, resulting in a complex and inefficient infrastructure. The BUYSMARTER initiative united technical leads from the various HHS divisions to determine a path forward. They concluded that the Department could, and should, generate savings and improve services by consolidating these together into one Department-wide EIS contract.
In service of consolidation, the team identified that there were more than 275,000 different lines of inventory involved, representing a vast number of different services that would be supplied by the HHS EIS contract. Once HHS had a clear set of needs, they went through multiple rounds of negotiation with potential vendors. HHS originally projected that consolidating contracts could save about $100 million over the lifetime of the contract. Based on internal calculations, HHS now estimated that the final agreement may result in approximately $700 million in savings and future cost avoidance over the 12 years.
The Department’s partnership with EIS can serve as a roadmap for how to generate savings with other types of HHS acquisitions and at other federal departments.