The General Services Administration’s (GSA) third attempt to modernize the catalog management system running on its Advantage! program seems to have finally hit the right mark.
GSA is expanding the number of users of the new FAS Catalog Platform (FCP) after a successful test run over the last year with vendors under the Office Supplies 4 contract.
Mike Shepherd, the director of the catalog management office in GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, said industry sellers and agency buyers will see a stark change when using the FCP from the previous catalog management system, called the Schedule Input Program (SIP), under GSA Advantage!.
“The FCP, in its most basic form, is replacing SIP with a new web-based user interface. It’s going to bring in some really new key enhancements that are going to benefit both our suppliers as well as our acquisition workforce and customers,” Shepherd said in an interview on Ask the CIO. “On the Advantage! side, it’s an intuitive web-based application. When you log in to FCP, you will quickly realize this is very different from that desktop SIP application. But really, it’s more than that. It’s a capability that’s going to be integrated with e-modification in such a way where we’re going to be able to capture catalog information during the modification process. What this means for our suppliers is we’re going to be able to automate publishing to GSA Advantage!. We’re going to speed up that time to get catalog changes down to the Advantage! platform.”
The time it takes to modify a catalog has been a major and long-standing pain point for industry for the last two decades.
GSA says the new platform automatically publishes modifications to GSA Advantage!, saving an average of 34 days for vendors adding new products to their catalogs. GSA also says it publishes catalog deletions within 1-to-2 days of a modification submitted by the contractor.