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NASA Ames Research Center uses Facilitate.com to speed up RFP Sourcing Evaluations

The Challenge

	Bill saw an even bigger opportunity for productivity gains by speeding up the board's decision making process with a more efficient means of collecting and sharing board member evaluations.

Within NASA, the evaluation of complex procurement bids is conducted by a Source Evaluation Board (S.E.B.) The six- to eight-member board prepares and distributes a request for proposal (RFP) to potential suppliers. The RFP contains multiple categories of requirements as well as instructions on how the responses will be evaluated. Once the proposals are received, the board members independently review and evaluate every item of each proposal. The board then meets to review all the evaluations and resolve any outstanding questions. Reaching consensus involves several rounds of autonomous rating against defined criteria. The board members must come to agreement on the score for each vendor for every criterion. They also must agree on the wording of evaluation findings to accompany the ratings. A typical evaluation process runs over the 180 day target schedule.

Bill Crawford, Automation Manager and frequent board member, spoke with Cathy Etheridge, the Procurement Manager, about taking steps to automate the S.E.B. process. They both knew that NASA wanted to streamline the procurement process and set an aggressive target of reducing bid evaluation time by at least 25%. One obvious area of improvement was to reduce the amount of paper that was produced during the evaluation by making all the information available electronically. But Bill saw an even bigger opportunity for productivity gains by speeding up the board's decision making process with a more efficient means of collecting and sharing board member evaluations.

The Choice

Bill turned to Facilitate.com. Other tools were on the market, but NASA was looking for software that would allow board members to work independently at first, and then come together at specific stages in their process. Facilitate.com offered both meeting room and distributed collaborative work processes.

The Solution

"The electronic brainstorm was an unqualified success…It took less than two hours to complete a full day's work." Bill Crawford, NASA Ames Research Center

Board members were provided with laptop computers with access to the network server running Facilitate.com. Bill had set up a series of topics and sub-topics to match the structured format of the evaluation process. The board members, working independently and in parallel, typed their remarks on each section of a proposal and categorized each item as a strength, weakness, comment or question. According to Bill Crawford, "The electronic brainstorming was an unqualified success. At our first meeting all the board members entered their comments into the database in 45 minutes to an hour. It took less than two hours to complete a full day's work." After completion of this phase, each member had a chance to review the online notes from the rest of the group, adding their own commentary electronically. Bill Henry, one of the board members, commented on the benefits he saw in this approach:

"One of the most time-consuming aspects of the evaluation is when the group meets to hear and discuss each member's input. With Facilitate.com, we entered our own evaluations and reviewed everyone else's electronically and in parallel. Just going through that process, we found that we were awfully close to consensus. I would say that Facilitate.com eliminated 90-95% of the verbal exchange without any loss of effectiveness."

The last step was to reach consensus on numerical ratings against a set of defined criteria by means of a series of votes, which were translated into final scores by applying a weighting algorithm. To wrap up, the written evaluations and numerical scores were formatted into a final set of recommendations.

The Result

The final report was delivered to the Evaluation Officer electronically in less than 120 days, fully 2 months earlier than scheduled. A complete record of the S.E.B.'s considerations and evaluations were retained in the Facilitate.com database, available if an audit were required.

"With Facilitate.com we have taken a major step towards our goal of creating a paperless procurement process," said Bill Crawford. "By capturing all the individual evaluations as well as the group discussion in the database, the evaluation process is self documenting. The final report was completed in half the time and contained clearer, more concise and more consistent observations. We are now looking at ways to use Facilitate.com to help us group author the RFP."

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