BPAs and Getting Paid
While there are far fewer regulations these days governing an agency's 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 vendor's 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 who 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.