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.
