The Standard Procurement System (SPS) is a

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

suite providing front-office business services to Acquisition professionals in the

United States Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national secu ...

Program History

SPS is an outgrowth of the DoD Corporate Information Management (CIM) initiatives in the early 1990s, and is intended to provide standard business processes and data management across disparate acquisition communities, including: * Posts, camps, and stations * Inventory Control Points * Major Weapon Systems * Contingency contracting The Standard Procurement System initiative began in 1994 with a directive from the Director of Defense Procurement to standardize the then approximately 70 acquisition systems in use on a single platform. In August 1996, the SPS contract was awarded through a competitive process to

American Management Systems American Management Systems (previous NASDAQ symbol: AMSY) was a high technology and management consulting firm, founded in 1970 by a group of five former United States Department of Defense, Defense Department officials who had worked under Rober ...

. The contract directed AMS to build the Standard Procurement System through an incremental process on top of the company's existing Procurement Desktop - Defense (PD²) application. SPS is one of the first DoD software acquisitions using Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Part 12 - Acquisition of Commercial Items rules. One of the major drivers behind SPS was the use of

Commercial off-the-shelf Commercial off-the-shelf or commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) products are packaged or canned (ready-made) hardware or software, which are adapted aftermarket to the needs of the purchasing organization, rather than the commissioning of ...

, or COTS, software. The software is licensed rather than purchased outright, and at the time marked a major shift in acquisition strategy for DoD. While DoD had previous experience in licensing software, it largely revolved around either desktop computing (

operating systems An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also inc ...

, office automation products, etc.) or back-end servers (

mainframe A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise ...

, relational database management systems, etc.). SPS is a business system and is licensed for 43,000 contracting officers and other acquisition professionals at DoD sites world-wide. The deployment of SPS met with several challenges, including a stop-development order in 2002 from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO). The program resumed after establishing an internal requirements board, automating its integration capabilities, improving product documentation, and implementing a shift from a client-server architecture to a Web application architecture. The SPS program has received several awards, including the Top Fed 100 award from Federal Computer Week (2003), the Grace Hopper Technology Leadership Award (2003), and CIO Magazine's CIO Enterprise Value Award (2005). By 2008, SPS had been deployed on more than 23,000 desktops worldwide, and processed more than $131 billion in

fiscal year A fiscal year (or financial year, or sometimes budget year) is used in government accounting, which varies between countries, and for budget purposes. It is also used for financial reporting by businesses and other organizations. Laws in many ...

(FY) 2006, up from $59.0 billion in FY 2004 In 2020, he DoD Standard Procurement System (SPS), deployed using the Procurement Desktop-Defense (PD2) application was still widely in use by many agencies, although the change in technology environment and age led to intent to sunset, which was pushed out to at least 2020.

External links

Standard Procurement System Home Page

Standard Procurement System

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Standard Procurement System, The Government software Federal government of the United States United States defense procurement