BPAs and Getting Paid
While there are far fewer regulations these days governing an
agencys procurement activities, a vendor working the federal
market must still keep up to date on the basic rules of the game.
To sell effectively, a vendor needs to know what authority an
agency has to buy the vendors goods and services. A contractor
needs to know the difference between an open market order, a GSA
Schedule order, and an order placed under a Blanket Purchase Agreement
(BPA). To ignore these rules is to open the door to more educated
competitors that know the ropes.
The articles in this chapter cover some of these fundamental points.
The three-part BPA series concerns the reinvention of BPAs under
the new GSA Schedule regime. Getting Paid deals with
an area that is still far more bureaucratic than in the private
sector.