Government Procurement Process

The government procurement process is certainly difficult to navigate and can easily be misinterpreted. The most important thing to understand about doing business with the government is that the entire process is procedural. There are numerous regulations and compliance issues on how the government can, and more importantly, cannot purchase products. This differs from the commercial market whereby there is a predetermined acquisition method used by the government that cannot be circumvented.

It is no surprise that the federal government’s budget has grown exponentially in the last 10 years. What is not as widely known is the processes they have put in place to make spending more efficient for them. As there were dramatic increases in budgets and spending, there was not a reciprocal increase in contracting officers and government employees to handle the effort.

So to resolve the issue, the government started creating Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contracts. These IDIQ contracts provide for an indefinite quantity of products and services to be purchased by government agencies during a fixed period of time (typically 5 years, can be as long as 10 years). For example, instead of itemizing every individual need and purchase requirement to update a single port facility, the Navy created a blanket “purchase order” that sets aside billions of dollars to update every naval port. This particular IDIQ is called SeaPort-e. SeaPort-e is the Navy's electronic platform for acquiring support services in 22 functional areas including Engineering, Financial Management, and Program Management.