Another Win for the Federal Acquisition Service.

This post was written by Adam Rose, Senior Associate at Jump Associates. Connect with him by commenting on this post.

Under the leadership of Tom Sharpe, the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS), has been undergoing a transformation. FAS is becoming a customer-centric organization and is focused on creating procurement tools and processes to make the procurement process better for everyone involved, from policy and agency leaders all the way down to purchasers and approvers.

Over the course of the past year, FAS has been making progress. Under the banner of this new strategy, Category Management, they have launched the Common Acquisition Platform, a new portal for acquisition and have gotten direct support from the White House with a directive written to all agencies to participate and support this new platform. The other weekend, FAS got another win. At the Gov Tech Hackathon in San Francisco they won the prize for Best Design with one of their new digital procurement tools — CommuniCart.

It’s no surprise they are being recognized and winning awards in the public and private spheres. The culture and process changes that FAS has been implementing are helping them deliver value to procurement professionals by engaging with these professionals to learn what services they need most. This shift, to an organization that prizes customer feedback, will be invaluable to the long-term success of CommuniCart, Category Management and FAS.

The trophy from this past weekend was a Bald Eagle stuffed animal, which I imagine will be one of many trophies on the road towards FAS’s big prize: a new vision for an efficient government, and millions of dollars in taxpayer savings.