NASA Procurement Has No Idea If It Is Becoming More Efficient
NASA’s Strategic Sourcing Program: NASA’s Strategic Sourcing Efforts Are Disjointed and Incomplete, OIG
” While NASA established a Strategic Sourcing Program as required by a 2005 Office of Management and Budget memorandum, it has never conducted a comprehensive, Agency-wide spend analysis to identify commodities that could benefit from a more strategic procurement approach. Further, although NASA performed limited spend analyses on individual commodities, it has not established requirements regarding how such analyses should be developed, analyzed, and used. While NASA officials said they have realized savings under specific strategic sourcing initiatives, NASA does not track its Agency-wide strategic sourcing efforts and therefore was unable to determine the extent of any efficiencies or cost savings.”
What are we going to order on an agency-wide basis? Computers? You cen see how well THAT works. At one time the NASA internal procurement system was a lot more extensive and complex, and I don’t think it saved any money; just meant more people had to sign off on every PR. Nowadays the business distribution system is so efficient it makes more sense to order most commodity products from Amazon and have them delivered where they are needed by UPS. For flight and R&D hardware there is little commonality so agency-wide procurement would not help. I just don’t see much value in the strategic sourcing program.