Courtesy Photo | NAVSUP FLC Jacksonville Contracting Officer Edward Whittaker navigates ProTrack....... read more read more
On Jan. 1, 2022, Naval Supply Systems Command’s (NAVSUP) Contracting Department completed the global implementation of its Procurement Tracker system also known as ProTrack.
ProTrack reshapes the contracting process through increased workflow efficiency and standardization. With this innovative tool, ProTrack users can now follow the status of procurement packages in near-real time, with all key tasks date-stamped and timed for accountability. Guided by a library of resources, templates, and FAQs, users communicate directly with NAVSUP contracting personnel assigned to their requirements, while also receiving automated email notifications regarding status updates and approaching deadlines. New and continuing to grow, the ProTrack user community is made up of nearly 3,000 individual users across the Department of Defense.
“ProTrack revolutionizes the way NAVSUP provides exceptional support to our mission partners,” stated NAVSUP Assistant Commander for Contracting Mark Bennington. “In addition to creating an innovative vehicle for users to submit their requests, ProTrack provides complete transparency into the status of every acquisition, a benefit that is critical in our effort to ensure mission readiness.”
ProTrack began in the spring of 2018 at NAVSUP Fleet Logistics Center (FLC) Jacksonville. With the project’s potential immediately apparent, NAVSUP Business Systems Center (BSC) personnel were brought in and NAVSUP Procurement Analyst Ryan McGowan was tasked with overseeing the project as a representative from NAVSUP Headquarters.
“We wanted to make the procurement request submission process easier for everyone involved to enhance warfighter readiness. We kept that readiness in mind throughout the entire development process with every decision we made,” said NAVSUP FLC Jacksonville Contracting Officer Edward Whittaker who led the development of contracting capabilities in concert with NAVSUP BSC to ensure optimized functionality.
By early 2019, the technology behind ProTrack was complete. Elementary-level testing soon followed and, in the fall of that same year, the 90-day pilot program began. With the resulting contract requests submitted through ProTrack, the Contracting Department team zeroed in on the tool’s three primary goals: Reduced Procurement Action Lead Time (PALT), increased transparency, and widespread standardization.
In pursuit of reducing PALT, ProTrack features a visual Procurement Status Tracker Bar. With this tool, ProTrack users can submit their request and follow along visually at every stage of the procurement package process - much like one might track a regular package online. This built-in concept, inspired by industry best practices, was incorporated as the central piece of ProTrack. Furthermore, to achieve increased transparency and standardization, ProTrack was structured to house a series of digitized web forms that are most commonly submitted with the Procurement Requests.
With all this information being retained and stored within ProTrack for future requests, the results are cumulative and the benefits long lasting. Down the road, if a ProTrack user has a similar requirement, they can find previously entered information, searching by key word or product code to access the requirements that match their criteria. From there, they can easily copy that existing request as a guiding baseline.
“We’ll see that benefit down the road,” states McGowan. “When ProTrack users go back in to submit their follow-on contracts, they’ll be able to bring forward previously submitted requests and 80% of the work is done for them.”
Propelled forward with these three primary goals in mind, ProTrack was brought to NAVSUP leadership in February 2020, and steps were taken to expand this tool to the NAVSUP Enterprise.
Consequently, this expansion necessitated widespread training. While onsite training had been originally planned, a classroom setting was prevented by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Working within the constraints of the following years, training became accessible online starting with the Naval War College as an introductory venture. From there, access to training spread to the rest of the NAVSUP FLC Jacksonville team and beyond. The eager response and increased demand from every corner of the Navy demonstrated the crucial gap that ProTrack fills in the procurement package process. Not only has the process been improved through streamline automation, but it will only get better as new features are added.
Since April 2021, McGowan and Whittaker, now also serving as a Procurement Analyst for the Contracting Directorate at NAVSUP Headquarters, have been engaged with NAVSUP BSC Enterprise Web Team to develop a series of enhancements, with the expansion of new interfaces as the key focal point. Now ProTrack can seamlessly interface to the Financial Management Document (FDM) tool, enabling users to receive the status on any submitted document from FDM, simply by entering their funding document number. Using this identifying number, ProTrack then makes a “call” into FDM to verify the document and provide its status. Similarly, an interface between ProTrack and the Navy’s Small Business Coordination Record Tool was implemented in the summer of 2021, followed by a completed interface to Navy Enterprise Resource Planning in January 2022.
“With each enhancement, Pro Track progresses into something that benefits each piece of the FLC business that we do,” McGowan explained, “streamlining many processes at once.”
Soon, the interface between ProTrack and the Standard Procurement System will be complete. Along with sending updates and alerts via a data feed built by BSC, ProTrack will populate contract award information automatically, eliminating all the manual inputs that contracting personnel are currently tasked with, reducing time, saving labor, and minimizing PALT.
“We are already seeing positive results, but the efficiencies gained in the future are going to be substantial,” said Bennington. “As the Navy strives to remain agile, NAVSUP is following suit. The contracting community needs to maintain the same level of agility, and the solutions created by ProTrack are certainly going to allow us to accomplish that. ProTrack was built to be sustainable.”
In ProTrack, NAVSUP recognized an opportunity for better contracting support, now and into the future.
“Pro Track was built with the future in mind,” said McGowan. “We’re progressing now into the future where all of the best processes and all of the best outcomes are geared toward building and accumulating information within ProTrack that will then be retained for long term use and lasting benefit.”
NAVSUP is headquartered in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and employs a diverse, worldwide workforce of more than 25,000 military and civilian personnel. NAVSUP and the Navy Supply Corps conduct and enable supply chain, acquisition, operational logistics and Sailor & family care activities with our mission partners to generate readiness and sustain naval forces worldwide to prevent and decisively win wars. Learn more at www.nasup.navy.mil, www.facebook.com/navsup and https://twitter.com/navsupsyscom.
| Date Taken: | 02.16.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 02.16.2022 13:16 |
| Story ID: | 414759 |
| Location: | JACKSONVILLE, FL, US |
| Web Views: | 1,221 |
| Downloads: | 2 |
This work, Reshaping the Contracting Process with ProTrack, by Hannah Rainey, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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