Business and Requirements Overview
General System Description
The Federal Acquisition Logistics Connect (FALCON) is part of GSA’s centralized supply system for the federal government. It is a key component of GSA’s Supply Chain suite of systems, in support of GSA’s mission to procure and distribute supplies and services across the federal government at the least financial cost to taxpayers. The supply system enables other agencies to downsize, or even eliminate their own supply and procurement activities. FALCON directly supports GSA/GSA OCIO’s procurement and supply activities by supporting order management and fulfillment through GSA schedules, and special-order requisitioning. FALCON is constantly enhanced to process orders from new and simplified ordering schemes, such as GSA Advantage.
The FALCON system is one of the FCS VPCaaS environments hosted within the AWS Cloud. FALCON only consumes AWS services that are in-scope FedRAMP certified. Additional review and approval processes are conducted by GSA-IT on approved AWS FedRAMP’ed services to assess applicability and security to the GSA-IT information system before they are considered for inclusion as part of the FALCON solution.
The FALCON system consists of many business functions which provide specific functionality, including an overarching user portal that is also named FALCON. The FALCON business functions, which are divided into modules, provides much of the core data processing and functionality of the FALCON System. These modules provide additional functionality including user interaction and inter-system communication.
Business Functions
Given a contract number or identifier, provides comprehensive contract related information across all types of contracts and methods of supply. OMS is the primary consumer and depends on the implementing service for contract details that are required to write purchase orders.
Maintenance of product data pertaining to NSN, Class, and Group, and used in various supply operations. OMS is the primary consumer and depends on this information for numerous functions, including order routing and workflow.
Responsible for updating data pertaining to National Item data. OMS is the primary consumer and depends on this information for numerous functions including order processing, order routing, purchase order writing, and workflow.
Provides comprehensive pricing information across all types of contracts and methods of supply (methods of supply are used by GSA for order fulfillment based upon specific contracts). Given an NSN or part number and a method of supply, provides a list of contracts able to fulfill the order, along with the price charged by each. OMS is the primary consumer and depends on the implementing service for pricing and contract information in order to write purchase orders. Includes management and recalculation of the pricing data in response to numerous events throughout the suite.
Maintenance of the fund codes provided by Defense Financial Accounting Service (DFAS) used to identify the funding source for purchasing agencies and other governmental entities during purchasing processes. OMS is the primary consumer and depends on this information for numerous functions, including order validation and billing.
The above business functions represent Supply Chain functions implemented in Set 1. Set 2 and Set 3 functions need to be added to make this list complete.
Additionally, Falcon will be further developed for NSN Management functions. This project is ongoing. The implementation architecture for NSN Management is Serverless Event-Driven Architecture. The Falcon team can provide the high-level Architecture diagram for this.