Enhancing Procurement Efficiency

Poor Document Quality

• Documents often lack detail or have too much detail and fail to provide adequate direction to the contractor.

• Documents have too much technical jargon and are not clear and concise.

• Many documents rely heavily on template and rinse and repeat practices, and submitters struggle with writing professional, government-compliant language.

Outdated Clauses

• Submitters are often re-using old ITAR submission documents

  and don’t know where to find the latest and greatest clauses to include (~4 outdated clauses per submission).

• Submitters spend significant time going back and forth with SMEs to get updated clauses and there is a huge bottle neck during SME review (submissions spend ~2 weeks on average in SME review).

• Submitters are not confident they have the right clauses, or they will even be able to find them, and submit knowing there are issues down the line.

Too Many Versions / People Involved

• There are multiple people working on submission documents at the same time, and passing documents back and forth leading to more bottlenecks in the process.

• There are multiple versions of submission documents leading to re-work due to confusion on what is the latest version.

Concepts

• Improve document quality (MVP): Users felt that this level of quality assurance DHS could provide would provide the most value by preventing rework, and streamline the pipeline with SME review. Users appreciated the guidance it was able to provide and felt they could prepare better SOWs.

• Identify outdated clauses: Users were extremely enthusiastic about DHS Chat’s ability to identify when a clause needs to be updated. Users believed this feature would save ~2 weeks in the overall process by saving time between back and forth with submitters / SMEs.

• Rewrite Statements of Work: Submitters / CORs were excited about DHS Chat’s ability to re-write documents to be more clear, concise, in plain language and standardized.

Feedback

• “One of the biggest challenges is the clauses can change and are outdated a lot. The same clause that worked before doesn’t work the next time. Using this system and getting the most up to date clause is very exciting! This would save weeks of going back and forth with submitters and the SMEs.” –COR, HQ

• “I think this would be really helpful. Some of the SOWs are too short and sweet and not detailed enough to provide clear direction for the contractor. On the other side, some people put in too much in the SOW and it needs to be more clear and concise, this would help with that too.” -Submitter, CBP

• “This tells me exactly which elements are in here and which ones are missing. I’m getting goosebumps, I like this!” -CBP Submitter

• “Quality Assurance is such a big deal because you’re stopping double work and stopping rework - anytime you can eliminate rework that’s a plus!” -ICE Submitter

What Worked Well

• Guidance: Submitters appreciated DHS Chat's feedback on specific elements to fix, as it helps with tedious tasks like ensuring completeness.

• Time Savings: Using DHS Chat to ask the right questions could save 45 minutes to an hour per ITAR by summarizing information from multiple documents. This would streamline the pipeline with SME review, potentially saving 2 to 3 days overall on back and forth with SMEs.

• Higher Quality Submissions: Using DHS Chat would enhance SME review by enabling more efficient quality checks at the submission level resulting in higher quality submissions.

What Users Still Need

• More Guided Prompts: The ideal system would provide predefined prompts for users to select that would ensure the SOW is clear, concise, and included all the required elements.

• Clause Review: They would find it particularly helpful if the system could identify and check the Terms and Conditions addendum for the correct clauses. Currently, users attach a comprehensive appendix, which often includes irrelevant information.

• Document Editing: Users also asked for DHS Chat to reformat the SOW based on its feedback and provide a new copy, that users could download eliminating the need for manual copy-pasting into Word.

• SOW Writing: Users wanted the ability to provide DHS Chat the elements of the SOW and have DHS Chat write SOWs for you, to save people from having to write it themselves.