"Award Information Published by Agencies
Awards information is public (with rare exceptions) and is published in many forms and formats, verbal, paper, and electronic. Generally, the information will tell you what was bought and for how much, when it was delivered and who won.
Awards information tells you what the agency buys, but it usually takes work to find out the program office and/or person who made the purchase. An awards notice usually lists the official buyer for the contract; call him or her and find out the name and number of the end-user. Also, ask for background information on the procurement and a copy of the contract if you think that will be useful.
At the federal level, you can obtain awards information in a number of ways. Here are three that immediately come to mind:
- The Federal Procurement Data Center (FPDC) publishes contract award data for all procurements exceeding $25,000 at http://www.fpdc.gov/fpdc/agency_reports.htm.
- The Defense Logistics Agency publishes source and pricing data for products assigned a National Stock Number (NSN) at http://progate.daps.mil/home/. The source and pricing data is published for procurements of any size.
- For buys under $25,000, purchasing offices maintain paper records of awards, and these are available upon request.
- Browse or search notices of award at FedBizOpps. (Go to http://www.fedbizopps.gov and click on the "Vendors" icon in the lower left part of the page. Search using keywords
at http://vsearch1.eps.gov/servlet/SearchServlet. Be sure check the "awards" radio button.)
- Search for awards at Navy Electronic Commerce Online (NECO). Specifically, go to http://www.neco.navy.mil/synopsis/synopsis.cfm and use the Advanced Search option.
Not all of these sites are what I'd call "user-friendly," so be patient. It may take some time to muddle through at first, but searching becomes reasonably routine once you've gained some experience.
A note on the FPDC database: it doesn't allow searching by product/service at an individual contract award level of detail. This is a major limitation since contract detail is required to determine the contracting officer's name and, in turn, the contact information for end-users.
Fedmarket.com offers the full fiscal year 2000 FPDC awards database in exportable format and special reports by product/ service code and geographic area. We sell this information at a lower price than FPDC. More information can be found at http://www.fedmarket.com/products/product-index.shtml.
State and local governments publish award data in much the same way as the federal government. Many large states, counties, and cities publish awards data at their web sites. If it's not at the web site, call and ask for it.
Agencies using a sealed bid procurement procedure publish award amounts and non-winning bid prices at the public bid opening.
Bidengine.com, http://www.bidengine.com, provides a convenient way to find awards data at the state and local level. Bidengine searches about 500 state and local Internet pages containing
awards data by keyword. If you sell centrifugal pumps, for example, Bidengine can tell you what agencies have purchased your product using the keywords "centrifugal pumps." Usually, the awards data found by Bidengine will tell you what type of pumps were bought, from whom, and the price paid per unit. Remember, if the agency bought pumps once, they will probably buy them again. A call to the buyer will tell you the name of the end-user who ordered the pump.
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