Subutai

That being the case, why do you want to enter into a five year "contract"? You want a "contract" for you don't know what at you don't know what prices? What sense does that make? How is that good business? The question isn't why should you get pricing. The question is why do you want a "contract"? As you said: "[W]hy bother having it?" Having a contractor build and run these things for us is definitely a good idea. We don't know what we are doing here and do not have the manpower or technical capacity to in-source. From that perspective, its typical contractor build-run IT. The difference is that its hardware intensive, and the hardware in question has unusually rapid turn-over, even for IT. Hence, the pricing issue. As for 5-years....I am not at all convinced 5 years is a good idea. Basically, the justification is that admin cost in terms of time and effort for new contracts/orders is extremely high, and so minimizing that cost via longer contracts is a legitimate objective. Reflects poorly on our efficiency, but that is the reality. A completely different acquisition approach - I'd much prefer an agency (or department)-wide multiple-award BPA with broad scope covering A/V support - however, that is something outside of my control. I have gone back to management to propose setting up that BPA I described in FY17.

Civilian agency, so MATOC/SATOC is not applicable, but it is a single award directed 8(a). Don't like that, but not my call and not going to change unless the SBA agrees, which is unlikely. Yes, indeed - why would you do that? That is my question as well. It appears to me that my office thinks that IDIQs *must have* pricing for all years for all things. Perhaps its because they think that anything that is not priced out in the IDIQ would be out of scope? Maybe is just custom, since the large majority of our IDIQ-type contracts are for labor/services? I don't know and am not going to ask, as I pick my battles and am electing to not fight over this. Ultimately, the IDIQ will have this specious pricing, and I will ignore it when pricing and analyzing orders. But I wanted to check, anonymously, whether this is, in fact, as crazy as it sounds or if I am missing something.

Newish CO here. I am pre-award with an IDIQ that will have a BOM for a bunch of contractor-provisioned IT COTS hardware (maybe 100 different items, up to $80K unit price). These IT materials are from a dynamic market. Prices, models, features all change quickly. I am being asked by management to get 5-year pricing at the unit level for everything, and incorporate that pricing into the IDIQ. To me, this is a bad idea and a waste of time. My question to you all is - am I right in my assessment? Am I missing something? I see nothing in FAR 16.5 requiring any pricing of any type at the IDIQ level. Pricing and price analysis occurs at the order level. I understand that ceiling unit prices can be established by the IDIQ and found fair and reasonable, so that orders with unit prices at or below those levels are also fair and reasonable automatically, and this greatly speeds up the procurement process. However, this is predicated upon the assumption that the unit prices and things being priced will be stable over time. For example, carpenters and database administrators exist now and are reasonably likely to exist five years from now, and their hourly rates aren't going to change very much between now and then. This is not the case with IT hardware. Basically everything on the IDIQ's BOM has a lifecycle of less than 5 years and prices will change quickly, and by a lot. Also, new stuff comes onto market all the time. So why bother with IDIQ level pricing, you are going to have to do the price analysis per order anyways? If you know now, before award, that the IDIQ unit pricing will be obsolete and therefore can't be used for price analysis in the future, why bother having it? I know I will not win this battle with management, so this is for my personnel edification.