What do you think Acquisition Management is and what are your impressions of how it is done in DoD?

ASSIGNMENT:

What do you think Acquisition Management is and what are your impressions of how it is done in DoD?

STUDENT 1 ( Arcadio)

For me, Acquisition management represent as an acquisition life cycle because it is a practice that brings resources together to help an organization to generate the goods or services that are to be offered to their customer. In addition, it is a process of acquiring resources essential for an organization to completely deliver their objectives toward an agreed services or products. Acquisition management encompass a process of procurement of commodities and services or contract which requires planning, price and cost analysis, contract arbitration and administration to ascertain the overall cost of certain items or services. The performance appraisal is also an additional emphasis of acquisition management since it is crucial to guarantee that the organization receives the utmost profits from resources acquired through merchants. Through cost evaluation and performance assessments, it help companies to find techniques for saving their resources and improved their return on capital expended for their organization operations. The method used in acquisition management is very significant since it benefits the organization in reaching their objectives much easier due to the proper allocation of responsibilities to bring together resources which are crucial in production. Through these processes, the organization could locate and handpicked better corporate associates who are suitable to fulfill a lasting business commitment. I can say from experience that these processes are strictly followed at the DOD-level especially when major acquisitions are being made because the cost effectiveness and the value of the money must be taken into consideration during the acquisition process to avoid waste of time and money.

STUDENT 2 (Kaitlin)

Acquisition management is what I do for the air force civil engineering squadron on a daily basis. We get products from a company to give to the people in our shops so they can go out and finish work orders so that the other squadrons don’t have problems with their buildings or roads. We do it in three different ways. The first way is by using our contracted company to order the material. We go into our system and “order” the material in our system which prints out the abstract for the material that we are requesting and then we give it to the contracted company and they get the material that we request. Then once they receive the material they then “sell” it to us and we go into our system to receive it. We basically buy the material from them. Once we have the material we issue it out to our shops so they can finish the work they are working on. The second way is when we go into our system and “order” the material in our system which prints out the abstract for the material we get a quote from our “customer” the personnel from the shops. The customer usually just searches the web if it is an item from Lowes or Home Depot to get the quote or they will get one from the company we are ordering from. Then we order it with our government credit card. Then the company will either ship the item to us or our shop personnel will go pick it up. Then we receive it in our system and issue it out to the shop when they come to pick it up. The way described in our lesson where you get the purchase order and then get three quotes we only use if it is a high dollar item or we are looking to set up a new contract for a service. When we go that route we work with the contracting squadron to find the best contract and we do this by using multiple different cost estimating tool. We have our shops go out and look at the work and estimate what materials they would use and the material cost and how much the project would cost in labor. They use this information when comparing the bids they received. We look at the abstract that the companies give us with their proposed bids for the service. We also look on the web for general prices and reviews of the companies that has submitted. The DOD is good at finding a contractor for a job at the lowest rate possible. However, I have always wondered if we only go for the cheapest quote. I have seen it with come of our contracts that it doesn’t seem like they really looked at what we were getting for our money. We have had some contracts written so loosely that they do not always complete the job the way that we wanted or there were loopholes that they were able to jump through. We have had to keep contractors on longer and pay them extra or have had to get another contractor too finish the job because there was a problem with the contract that prevented the job from being complete. Maybe it was just the way that person wrote the contract or we are to focused on the money aspect and not making sure the contract has everything we need.