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CALM

Business Goals and Objectives

The goal of CALM is to provide a:

solution for all types of contract actions, from the simplest to the most complex. Currently, more than ten systems coordinate to accomplish the acquisition lifecycle. Once CALM is finished, many of those will be retired, yielding to the consolidated workflow within CALM. A significant impact to user experience and management overhead.

The objective of CALM is to provide a central contract writing service for GSA FAS. Because so many systems have contract writing built into their workflow, it would be a tremendous benefit to standardize and centralize that particular functionality. The diagram below highlights the systems that are within scope to either use or be completely subsumed by CALM.

Business Capabilities

The following two diagrams illustrate the items needed to be in place to fully serve both vendors and customers. We have broken out the lifecycle capabilities from the foundational (common) ones since they are fundamentally different.

Lifecycle Capabilities

Figure 2 - CALM Lifecycle Capabilities

Lifecycle capabilities enable contract development from its inception to closeout. First requirements need to be established followed by planning for the acquisition. Once the desired product or service is fully understood (synopsis), then solicitation can proceed. Vendor responses to the solicitation then need to be vetted culminating in source selection. Awards can then be made but that is not the end of it. The contract might have modifications, changes that will require administrative action (contract administration). Finally, once the contract has run its course, then it will need to be closed out.

All of these lifecycle capabilities work together and, therefore, need to be scoped and integrated to allow vendors and customers to provide and purchase products and services through GSA.

Foundational Capabilities

Foundational Capabilities are those that are needed throughout the lifecycle of a contract. They are common capabilities that generally more than one of the life cycle capabilities will require to function properly.

Figure 3 - CALM Foundational Capabilities

Conceptual Architecture

Conceptually, CALM plans to use a SaaS solution as the keystone for CALM. The ideal SaaS solution will provide an externally consumable API with most, if not all, of the contract specific handling logic being configurable. Since the SaaS solution will not be a perfect fit, some components will need to be created to either integrate with or run alongside the eventual solution.

Figure 4 - Conceptual CALM SaaS System

CALM Technical Architecture & Vision

No-VPN solution

Implement a security solution through the CALI platform to centralize all CALM network traffic for improved security posture and maintainability, leveraging stackArmor's ThreatAlert security solution

UI/UX

Improve CALM overall usability and look and feel across the CALM ecosystem to deliver a unified experience to the users to include vendor community.

Data integration platform

Establish common access to all GSA enterprise data gateways to address all CALM data needs.

FAS ID Single Sign On

Establish full integration with GSA FAS Identity Access Management services to achieve SSO and unify user experience.

Current Implementation Plan

The current plan for CALM is a multi-cloud solution where AWS cloud and MS Azure cloud services will be blended to deliver the complete functionality.

Figure 5 - CALM Architectural Components

External systems like Pegasys, Docusign, Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS), eBuy, Common Catalog Platform (CCP) and System for Award Management (SAM) will be integrated along with other systems and services.

Internally, CALM will share its data with both the GSA systems via eSOA (future -> API Gateway) and the FAS Enterprise Data Architecture (EDA). The diagram below expresses this intention along with some of the functional building blocks that will need to be put in place.

Figure 6 - CALM Data Integration

(1-Broadcast, 2-Migration, 3-Correlation, 4-Bidirectional Synch, 5-Aggregation)

External Systems

CALM services will be used by external systems like SAM, FPDS, eBuy, Pegasys and Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS).

Figure 7 - CALM External Connections

Lastly, CALM will create an interface that external systems will be able to use to directly interact with it. Further, CALM will use FALCON to maintain the contract lifecycle data which, in turn, will keep the FPDS and PegaSys data up to date.