GSA Announces Deals for Car Sharing

In an effort to reduce costs, GSA or General Services Administration has announced deals with Enterprise, Hertz, CarShare, ZipCar and Carpingo to provide car sharing services for GSA employees. In theory, this will save the government agency money by reducing the need for taxi-fair, vehicle leasing and automobile purchases. The pilot program will run for a year with an option to renew if successful.

Having come under fire several times for wasteful spending recently, GSA seeks to repair its image and become more efficient. Despite this, they still require antiquated techniques for maintaining GSA schedules often at the frustration of private contract holders. The need to run SIP (Schedules Input Program) and upload all product images just to remove a single item from a schedule is just one example of a totally inefficient system. The legacy software program SIP also is unwieldy slow and problematic. Their inability to reduce GSA schedule maintenance time not only adds to unnecessary costs for the government but also hurts private dealers that GSA ironically is supposed to help.

Even seemingly good causes like the AbilityOne program also suffer from unnecessary red tape. AbilityOne sells products to support the blind and other individuals living with major health issues. Filtering out ETS (Essentially the Same) items from schedules in favor of AbilityOne equivalents continues to be an enormous challenge for dealers that cannot even get an unambiguous list of items to filter out. When the system fails, dealers take the fall for non-compliant items on their schedules even when the wholesaler is really to blame for not providing exact skus.

Despite the best efforts of General Services Administration to cut costs, such efforts are in vein until it reforms the system as a whole. Emods or Electronic Modification requests are overly cumbersome and SIP is even worse. The whole approval system of emods and schedules needs to be rethought and greatly simplified if they expect to truly reduce their costs and help the AbilityOne program and schedule holders.