Obtaining Price During Solicitation - not a CLIN

[joel hoffman]

Might, true enough. She said they worked hard to make them veg free over the past year.  And yes I understood that they were remote and couldn't all be inspected. No matter how they establish prices, there will have to be a way to verify the condition and the work necessary to be performed and that it was done. Due to the remoteness,  one might not be able to pay for labor on a unit price basis. The travel to and from the sites and set up to clean up any small areas will probably far exceed the actual time to do the actual work, if they truly "worked hard" to keep them clean. 

Obviously, we don't know much about the whole scope of work, anyway. 

[baierle]

I appreciate all of your input.  I'm going to get a price per acre to help me negotiate when the inevitable happens.

R-EB

[Guest Vern Edwards]

Good idea. I haven't seen your facilities, but unless they are very large and you expect them to be uniformly overgrown you might want to go with square yard instead of acre. 

[here_2_help]

11 hours ago, joel hoffman said:

No matter how they establish prices, there will have to be a way to verify the condition and the work necessary to be performed and that it was done. 

If only there were some means of taking photographs at the site to document the initial condition as well as the condition after clean-up, and then transmitting those photos to the CO.

Do you think the contractor might be able to equip the site manager with a cell phone? You know, the newfangled ones with cameras that transmit pictures via the internet? Would that work?

[Deaner]

1 hour ago, here_2_help said:

If only there were some means of taking photographs at the site to document the initial condition as well as the condition after clean-up, and then transmitting those photos to the CO.

I've done something similar with photo's to verify before and after conditions. It did work well, but the one thing that I didn't consider was my agency's email restricts receiving emails with attachments that exceed 5mbs. Of course I could have received 50 separate emails, but we ended up getting discs mailed to us as the number of pictures in my particular case totaled ~250mbs per month. Doesn't sound like that big of deal right, except the notebooks my agency uses don't have disc drives, so the contractor then setup a cloud service so we could download the pictures, nope agency restricts file sharing websites. Work order to make an exception to file sharing websites on one computer and to get an external disc drive went no where with our IT office. Then we started getting flash drives mailed to us. Plugged that in landed me in remedial training as flash drives are not authorized to use on our network. Ended up getting a couple hundred pictures printed and mailed to me for about a year.

Seemed like a hassle to solve such a small problem. Maybe I should have used a personal server...

[Guest Vern Edwards]

Quote

Seemed like a hassle to solve such a small problem.

You have to love government contracting, because you really have no choice. Think about that before you ever say that the government ought to do something about something.

[bob7947]

As more and more organizations realize that an attack can come from someone's refrigerator an ocean away, things will get worse.  This article gives some idea of what is going on with the IoT.  Here is another article to ponder.  

Your organization may be able to come up with a simple solution but there is reason to fear the internet of things.

 

[Matthew Fleharty]

37 minutes ago, bob7947 said:

 there is reason to fear the internet of things.

How is the cyber security for Wifcon?

[bob7947]

Like any site on the internet, it and it's web host are constantly under attack. 

[Deaner]

1 hour ago, bob7947 said:

As more and more organizations realize that an attack can come from someone's refrigerator an ocean away, things will get worse.

I do agree with that statement, but to have some type of EDI with a contractor (who has completed a NACI) for the purpose of downloading .jpg photos isn’t all that high of a risk in my opinion.   

I think I steered us off topic in this thread… o well. Perhaps I’ll start a new discussion.

[bob7947]

Deaner:

There is always a workaround.  Someone in your IT needs to understand all possible risks and listen to you.

[joel hoffman]

I also had thought about using photos to verify the discovery of existing vegetation or other necessary remedial work. One of the benefits of being a member of the Flat Earth Society (OF - "Old F.RT") is that I remember actually using paper photos, (oh, gee!), that could be evaluated, then scanned for contract electronic filing purposes. That is one possible work around for the e-mail security restrictions.  

Hard to imbed a virus in a mailed picture, unless the senders and postal employees have physical viruses on their hands. Then, have somebody spot inspect a sample of the reported sites for QA purposes, if appropriate.  

If there has been a robust effort to control vegetation during the past year, there shouldn't be a whole lot of sites that require extra work.  If there are, it is possible that "Something is rotten in Denmark".

That's one possible workaround to IT security challenges.  So far, there hasn't been any mention in this thread of actual photo prohibitions at the sites. 

[Guest Vern Edwards]

I know that most will disagree with me, but, on balance, i think that email, texting, and voice mail (but not ordinary telephone communications), especially email, have done the world more harm than good. I think it has made us less productive, and in some cases stupid and lazy.

It's too late, though.