Back on October 1, 2015, GSA launched its new Professional Services Schedule (PSS), which consolidates eight professional services contract schedules into one.
The eight schedules are:
#520 – Financial and Business Solutions (FABS)
#541 – Advertising and Integrated Marketing Services (AIMS)
#738II – Language Services
#871 – Professional Engineering Services (PES)
#874 – Mission Oriented Business Integrated Services (MOBIS)
#874V – Logistics Worldwide (LOGWORLD)
#899 – Environmental Services
#00CORP – Consolidated Services
This is important for everybody to understand because it means that the old MOBIS schedule that many of us had, the one that handles program management services, is now a part of this new schedule and has a lot more scope than before.
This creates a new opportunity for people who have a MOBIS schedule or one of these other schedules to now add all these different functions to their schedule and bid on more work.
In particular, there may be things that you didn’t feel like you were quite qualified for, but now all you have to do is add another SIN code (this is not any kind of moral judgment; it stands for Special Item Number) to your profile. GSA has detailed instructions for how to modify your information.
It’s very important to understand and follow GSA’s rules for how you stay on a schedule, because the whole reason for this change is that GSA is trying to reduce the number of vendors and the number of contracting staff they need, in order to hold their costs down.
As Tiffany Hixson writes on the GSA blog, “By reducing the number of contracts supporting the Professional Services category of spend, GSA will eliminate more than 700 contracts resulting in an estimated five year savings of $3.95 million, and sustained savings of $1.29 million annually thereafter.”
MOBIS was a big deal before, but this new combination of MOBIS with professional engineering and the other schedules makes it a really big deal. So as readers, you should really be up to date on what these schedules look like, what your obligations are to stay on GSA’s good list, and most importantly how to make use of this increased opportunity.
