The Homeland Safety Division’s procurement store was busier than ever final 12 months, spending virtually $24 billion on about 60,000 transactions. Fiscal 2023 is anticipated to be even busier. Because of this Paul Courtney, the chief procurement officer at DHS, has made innovation one in all his three precedence areas together with workforce and course of enhancements. “COVID has helped us understand simply how ready quite a lot of our expertise options already have been. We developed an digital contract… READ MORE

The Homeland Safety Division’s procurement store was busier than ever final 12 months, spending virtually $24 billion on about 60,000 transactions.

Fiscal 2023 is anticipated to be even busier.

Because of this Paul Courtney, the chief procurement officer at DHS, has made innovation one in all his three precedence areas together with workforce and course of enhancements.

“COVID has helped us understand simply how ready quite a lot of our expertise options already have been. We developed an digital contract submitting system earlier than the pandemic, and we shortly understand how important it’s for the continuity of our operations. We’re honing it, making it higher, however we had that in place earlier than the pandemic. We have been already there in quite a lot of areas, however the pandemic made us understand that we should proceed to do that nice issues, but in addition give attention to issues to make life higher,” Courtney mentioned on Ask the CIO. “On the method enhancements, over the past 12 months or so we’ve seemed internally about do now we have pointless steps in our coverage course of that we are able to remove? We checked out if it takes 12 stops for doc to get accredited, in all probability midway alongside that method, folks in all probability are simply checking the field. We’re searching for these areas the place we’re including worth and the place we simply are offering pointless steps. We need to proceed to streamline that to get our workers to essentially give attention to the essential job or procurement inside the division.”

The digital contract submitting system, partially, depends on robotics course of automation (RPA) to add paperwork.

This RPA is one in all a number of the CPO’s workplace has initiated over the previous couple of years.

Decreasing the paperwork burden

Courtney mentioned DHS has borrowed the DORA RPA from the Military to carry out contractor accountability determinations.

“We partnered with the Military to conduct an preliminary six month pilot of DORA with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Workplace. It’s been phenomenal. To this point, they’ve performed simply large work with it, the suggestions acquired thus far has been extremely favorable,” he mentioned. “DORA is simple to make use of and saving a big time for a workforce. We’re evaluating how we are able to develop using DORA departmentwide. This can be a case the place it’s not making any determinations for us to simply present the information shortly again to our workforce.”

One other RPA effort is with the U.S. Customs and Border Safety directorate to make use of a bot to automate guidelines based mostly duties and actions reduce the executive burden on workers.

Courtney mentioned the venture, known as “D the bot” began in 2021 and now could be accessible to all CBP procurement places of work.

“It has carried out 200-plus actions in deobligated over $30 million. It actually lowered the time manually spent working this course of by virtually 70%,” he mentioned. “It used to take an hour for a workers member to do a deobligation on common, now it’s simply minutes to have that performed.”

A 3rd instance is simply getting began. Courtney mentioned DHS lately awarded three contracts to small companies to offer synthetic intelligence instruments to enhance how the company conducts market analysis.

“The AI for market analysis answer was dropped at bear via a collaborative partnership with a number of different federal companies, such because the Workplace of Federal Procurement Coverage and the Workplace of the Director of Nationwide Intelligence (ODNI),” he mentioned. “These are industrial distributors who constructed the software program that may go into SAM.gov, the Federal Procurement Knowledge System (FPDS) and different public going through public open supply data, and provides customers a fast view of {the marketplace}. Whether or not it’s cybersecurity drones, workplace provides or no matter few key phrases they put in, customers will see an inventory of distributors who’ve beforehand been awarded contracts with the federal authorities for related necessities.”

He mentioned the information will embrace enterprise sort, like 8(a) or women-owned small enterprise, the greenback quantity of the earlier contract award and the opposite companies the seller has labored with.

Contracting officers additionally will be capable to drill down into the information to search out out extra data.

Need for AI instruments driving modifications

Courtney mentioned he expects the expertise to assist the workforce save time, give attention to greater worth work and improve the standard of their market analysis.

“This received’t be simply utilized by the procurement workforce, can be utilized by a complete acquisition workforce,” he mentioned. “Our subsequent step is to pilot these options now via June, simply to measure the time saved and the standard of the particular market analysis.”

All three ofthese examples, Courtney mentioned, got here from the workforce’s want to make use of extra superior analytical instruments and synthetic intelligence. On the similar time, DHS is making an attempt to additional empower its acquisition workforce to make higher and, typically, sooner choices.

He mentioned typically meaning utilizing extra of risk-based strategy with the procurement technique roadmap (PSR).

“The thought behind that PSR was earlier than a proper acquisition plan goes via all of the stops, it has to make it to the chief procurement officer and the senior procurement government to get a dialog going. Over time, we’ve realized that the elements put some extra steps in place so the casual procurement technique roadmap grew to become a really formal procurement technique roadmap, virtually as detailed because the acquisition plan,” he mentioned. “In conversations with the heads of contracting all through the division, we took a step again and mentioned, ‘is there a greater method to do that?’ We’ve now made the procurement technique roadmap a voluntary dialog. If you wish to have a dialog earlier than the PSR will get to us, let’s have it, however we’re not going to power it on you.”

Moreover, there are steps within the course of that DHS elements put in place, thus creating a protracted street to get an acquisition plan accredited, which provides to the delays in acquisitions.

“We’re wanting on the energy of workforce to be sure that it doesn’t take that lengthy to achieve the signatory people on an acquisition plan,” he mentioned. “We need to empower and have a workforce be prepared to guide as they’ve all the time performed and to present them the flexibility to take action there. There are difficult procurements that the division does so we meet with our heads of contracting month-to-month and we’ll take that point to have these conversations, and assist that with our collective knowledge of all of the procurement experience within the division. We need to be certain we proceed to empower the workforce to make these choices, and that we’re right here to assist them.”