The Government Accountability Office (GAO) today issued a new report you might be interested in entitled “GAO-17-54 Navy Ship Maintenance: Action Needed to Maximize New Contracting Strategy's Potential Benefits”.

According to the GAO, “the Navy’s Multiple Award Contract, Multi Order (MAC-MO) contracting strategy for ship repair offers a number of potential benefits compared to the former Multi Ship, Multi-Option (MSMO) contracting strategy, including increased competition. A key difference is that the MAC-MO strategy intends to control costs through the use of firm-fixed price contracts and the use of third-party planners, which could be cost-effective if the planner produces clearly defined work specifications for the repair contractor to price and execute. Prior to implementation of the new strategy, the Navy conducted market research and pilot-tested attributes of the strategy with pilot maintenance periods for a number of ships. The Navy recognized several lessons learned from its pilot maintenance periods and has made subsequent process changes to address key lessons and support MAC-MO. These include a longer time frame for the planning process for finalizing work requirements (see figure). According to the Navy, this additional time is needed to promote stable requirements and, therefore, pricing….GAO recommends the Navy assign responsibility to a single entity to systematically assess implementation of the MAC-MO strategy. DOD agreed with GAO’s recommended action and plans to report biennially on strategy implementation.”