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Business and Requirements Overview

ACR serves as the authoritative source for approved product and services catalog offerings for GSA Contracts. ACR receives catalog files (product catalogs, services catalogs, photos, terms and condition files) from the vendor facing systems (FCP, EDI, and SPI). ACR then processes, validates, enriches, commits, and sends approved catalogs to GSA Advantage for publication. The current scope of ACR includes all MAS and VA contracts, but is being expanded to include a wider range of contract types, such as Blanket Purchase Agreements.

Challenges with Previous Solution

The legacy catalog system provides limited scalability, resulting in extended timelines and diminished performance for large vendor catalogs. In the legacy system, large vendor catalogs could require a day, or even several days to be processed and made available for CO review. If several large catalogs are submitted in the same timeframe, the timelines would increase even more, as the performance of the legacy system degrades due to the limited ability to scale. ACR provides an architecture that is scalable, extensible, and maintainable. With improved performance and reduced catalog timelines, the time to market for vendor offerings is vastly improved.

Another challenge of the legacy systems is the handling of non-compliant products and other related supply chain risks. A key feature of the modernized FCP and ACR Catalog Management platform is providing actionable market research to vendors in the form of Compliance & Pricing Reports, resulting in catalog submissions with reduced compliance issues and more competitive pricing. This reduces supply chain risks, improves product pricing, and ensures only workforce approved products are visible to buyers on GSA Advantage.

Impact of New Solution

With ACR, the timelines associated with catalog processing have vastly improved. Processing speeds of large catalogs have been increased by multiple orders of magnitude. As an example, in the legacy system, very large catalogs may require several days to be processed and made available for CO review. In ACR, even the largest catalogs are processed and made available to the CO within hours of submission.

In support of FCP vendors, ACR is providing FCP with detailed market research data for proposed product catalogs. This information is captured in Compliance & Pricing Reports, which are being provided to the vendors for action. As a result, compliance and/or pricing issues are being addressed prior to review by Contracting Officers, resulting in a more efficient review process, fewer compliance issues, and improved pricing.

Metrics

A daily catalog report is used to provide catalog statistics and metrics. This report collects and consolidates catalog data for every ACR vendor catalog submission since ACR was first released in October of 2021. For each catalog submission, the report pulls key data from the individual ACR microservices, such as catalog status (e.g., approved, published, etc.), catalog type (e.g., Replacement, Add, etc.), product counts, parsing time, loading time, validation time, time to load a catalog into CORS, etc. Using this report, statistical analysis is performed to evaluate catalog metrics; such as performance timelines versus catalog size, median timelines, 90 percentile, 99 percentile, etc.