GSA procurement modernization continues with point-of-sale task order award
The General Services Administration will modernize its point-of-sale (POS) system with a five-year, $5.2 million task order award to Karsun Solutions.
The GSA Enhanced Checkout (GECO) task order is one of several new awards under the CIO Modernization and Enterprise Transformation (COMET) blanket purchase agreement (BPA) for upgrading or replacing outdated backend procurement systems.
Currently, GSA’s online and physical stores use Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System, which ceased development in 2015, for transactions. Karsun Solutions proposed the newer Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, which runs on Azure, as the replacement system.
GSA’s vendor catalog of about 25 million item records will soon exist within GECO in real-time, Terry Miller, chief operating officer at Karsun Solutions, told FedScoop.
“Before, a lot of these store managers were running the risk that they would have to load new items and do updates overnights and weekends, and now using this — the elasticity that we’re going to bring — they can do batch ingestions or run it in the background,” Miller said. “So store operators don’t have to worry about those types of disruptions to operations anymore.”
GECO could become a system that other agencies outside GSA use, he added.
The Marines are one of the biggest customers on the current POS system, and Karsun Solutions will integrate the military branch’s Hazardous Materials Management System into GECO.
Karsun Solutions also plans to “hyper-personalize” the digital shopping experience for GSA customers with a better user interface, Miller said.
The GECO task order is Karsun Solutions’ first under COMET, but the company was a prime contractor on its $121 million predecessor, the CIO Application Maintenance, Enhancements, and Operations (CAMEO) contract.
After initial COMET task orders were awarded, several others were announced last week — including the Contract Acquisition Life-Cycle Management (CALM) contract-writing system. And more task orders are in the works.
“They [just] put out the fleet modernization task order, so that’s one that I think a lot of companies are looking at,” Miller said. “That’s one of the bigger ones.”
