September 2017 Bid Protest Review™: Inconsistencies Between BOEs and Technical Approach Can Lead To
This article reviews the recently published protest decision Matter of: Lockheed Martin Corporation, B-411365.2.
The subject ID/IQ task order procurement issued by the Department of the Air Force for operations and support for warning and attack assessment of air, missile and space threats under the North American Aerospace Defense Command Cheyenne Mountain Complex–Integrated Tactical Warning/Attack Assessment and (NCMC-ITW/AA) Space Support Contract (NISSC).
Lockheed was the incumbent contractor under the predecessor Integrated Space Command and Control (ISC2) contract for the past 15 years.
Contract award was to be made on a best value basis, with an integrated assessment of the following three evaluation factors, in descending order of importance: technical; past performance; and cost/price.
The SSEB stated that Lockheed’s proposal presented a moderate risk because it had not reconciled its technical approach for reducing labor hours with the resources proposed in its BOEs. Winner: Raytheon ($199.7M). Lockheed Martin ($178.3M) protest: denied.
My takeaways are:
Reductions in hours (ostensibly from historical actuals) based generally on “right sizing” and “efficiencies,” without any explanation for how the technical approach supports these reductions is a non-starter (illustrating the challenge of the incumbent with same program historical actuals)
Always provide the link between the initial and revised proposals in the form of a detailed change matrix (whether or not requested)
Do not change the “reductions” amount (up or down) between EN response and FPR without explanation (in this case Lockheed “reduced” the reductions from 69% to 40%).
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