Is British concept to "contract for availability" an idea for BASOPS?

Based on Britain's Defence (it's spelled "defence" there) Industrial Strategy, procurement is taking a real turn for performance based contracting. In their strategic document, they state that

(they) also recognise that the bedrock of (their)procurement policy has to be long-term value for money.

This is a principle that we in U.S. federal procurement also believe in.

In fact, they are taking this to great lengths by contracting for aircraft availability, rather than for spare parts or maintenance. The outcome contracted for, then, is having each aircraft available to fly missions.

They call it "through-life support" or lifetime support. They are using it to improve their industrial capabilities. Perhaps, that is a practice we could employ with our vehicle maintenance practices- oh that's right, AMC will be taking that over. How about some of our other recurring contracts.

Let's think about how that might work out by improving our installation capabilities, as well.

Interesting perspective on federal contracting in the future

Commercial practices in federal procurement as a "hot" issue may be back in style. A new report by Government Futures (get your copy of the report in .pdf format or view the webcast) talks about using commercial business practices. We are used to hearing about such practices as buying commercial, off the shelf items, for example.

However, this time, commercial business practices include such things as using web-based buying, tracking and spend analysis systems, strategic sourcing and something they call aggregate buying (buying in bulk throughout the "enterprise" (the whole Army, for instance, not the space ship)).

[Is it legal to have parenthesis inside parenthesis? Just wondering...]

The "quote of the article" is by the president of Government Futures who is quoted as saying

Pockets of excellence sit side by side with shops where innovation is not rewarded

Very interesting take on this topic. The most interesting thing to me, though, is the graphic that estimates how long it will take for federal government adoption of such practices. This report expects widespread adoption by 2014 of web-based procurement systems.

We may get SPS Increment 3 by then.