Business and Requirements Overview

FAS IT’s Acquisition Process and Systems

The systems in scope for the FSS19 Phase 3 Modernization effort play a vital role in helping federal agencies acquire and deploy information technology and professional services solutions. They allow GSA’s acquisition workforce to connect federal agencies with external vendors so that they can procure the goods and services they need at the best value possible.

This acquisition process can be divided into two key stages: Pre-Award and Post-Award. The high-level process flow is depicted in the figure above.

Pre-Award systems include SWS, eOffer, and ORS. These applications help the GSA acquisition workforce prepare solicitations to acquire goods and services from the private sector (SWS), allow the vendor community to submit offers against those solicitations (eOffer), and allow the government to review offers and award contracts to the most qualified vendors (ORS).
Post-Award systems include (but are not limited to) FSSOnline, eFSSOnline, Contracting Services, and MassMods. These applications allow the GSA acquisition workforce to manage active contracts (FSSOnline and eFSSOnline), close out contracts (FSSOnline), and initiate contract modifications — including modifications to individual contracts (FSSOnline) and mass modifications to groups of contracts (Mass Mods). Vendors may also initiate contract mods via eMod. The FSS19 Phase 3 Modernization effort focuses on migrating the Post-Award systems of FSSOnline, eFSSOnline, MassMods, Contracting Services and related Cobol programs to the cloud.

Business Functions

The following business functions and applications are part of the FSS19 Phase 3 Modernization initiative and are part of the post-award processes:

• The Mass Mods Web application is used by external vendors to accept modifications that GSA initiates for mass groups of contracts. Mass Mods Admin, part of the Mass Mods application, is a relatively new portal that allows internal users to manage vendor user accounts as well as allows the business line to initiate customized mass mods.
• FSSOnline is a client-server desktop application. It is a procurement tool for the FAS workforce to track and manage contracts and mods from award date through contract closeout. It includes FSSOnline Reports to help aid in the decision making. A small portion of FSSOnline functionality is currently housed in eFSSOnline, a separate but related web-based application. FSSOnline also includes a Security module, a role-based registration service for several acquisition applications in the ecosystem.
• Contracting Services provides core back-end processes and web-services to orchestrate the above contract and contract modification processes.
• The Acquisition workforce also leverages URSA, a mainframe based reporting tool for pre-configured as well as ad-hoc reports, to aid in data analysis and decision support. The graphic below shows some of the specific modules within all of the pre-award and post-award systems, and notes which functions are specifically in scope for the FSS19 Phase 3 Modernization project.