GSA's fast lane is open for business

The General Services Administration has opened a fast checkout lane on its Advantage high volume IT goods ordering platform.

GSA's Advantage Select is designed to allow federal purchasers a more convenient way to order commodity IT goods, said Erv Koehler, regional commissioner for GSA Region 4, in an interview during Federal IT Acquisition Summit in Washington on Oct. 20.

The agency unveiled the choose-and-click capability in June and has been fine tuning it over the last few months.

Among the first IT commodities are the five standard computer workstation configurations mandated for federal use by the Office of Management and Budget on Oct. 16.

GSA Advantage Select, said Koehler, works like the product select function on Amazon, allowing federal contracting personnel to choose and pay for computer monitors, hard drives and other everyday commodity goods more quickly and efficiently.

The products have been pre-competed and are selected among GSA's schedule of vendors.

GSA had said the concept behind Advantage Select is for the agency to do the upfront work for its customers and award short-term blanket purchasing agreements  that leverage existing contractor inventories while looking to tiered pricing discounts. The contracts, said Koehler, are short duration, three months, six months or so, by intent. The shorter contracts, he said, allows GSA to negotiate better pricing more often, keeping it closer to the pricing in commercial markets.

The function, located on GSA's Advantage homepage, is much like the aisle "end-cap" displays at supermarkets, he said, allowing customers to find popular bulk items and pay for them without the work of searching through the entire store for them.