Overview
DAWSON is a Native Hawaiian global business enterprise serving the U.S. Department of Defense and other federal government clients. Operating worldwide, DAWSON is headquartered in Honolulu, Hawaii with offices across the U.S.
Challenges
DAWSON was looking to better align its contract lifecycle management activities and digitize manual processes with a single, integrated web-based solution that could service contracts with customers and subcontracts with providers and joint ventures, in addition to complying with critical federal government contracting practices, such as:
- FAR, DFAR Clauses etc.
- Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) is the primary regulation used by all executive agencies in their acquisition of supplies and services with appropriated funds. FARs define 400+ clauses that federal government agencies need to incorporate to their contracts as applicable. DAWSON needed to populate its system with all FAR clauses in order to link them to the right contracts and automatically synchronize these clauses with federal government databases.
- Clause Flow-down
- Subcontracts with providers needed to have flow-down clauses automatically linked from DAWSON’s respective prime contracts. Modifications to those prime contracts clauses also needed to trigger modifications to subcontracts where applicable.
- Various Monetary Amounts and Workshare
- Tracking various monetary fields such as award, ceiling, and funded amounts are critical in federal contracting. In addition to this requirement, DAWSON required a system that could calculate work-share percentages at various contract levels to ensure compliance with imposed subcontracting goals and create separate records for tracking contract modifications to adjust monetary amounts, add/modify/delete Contract Line Item Numbers (CLINs) and clauses, extend dates, etc.
- Periods of Performance
- Federal government contracts are further broken down by Period of Performances (PoPs). PoP timeframes are typically defined as one year and are grouped by CLINs. To appropriately manage these key timeframes, DAWSON needed a system that could project’s financial information sorted by specific PoPs.
- Contract Line Item Numbers (CLINs)
- Federal government contracts are often sorted by Contract Line Item Numbers (CLINs) to account for each item being procured. The unit of measure, quantity, monetary amounts, and description must be captured and tracked per CLIN.
- Contractor Performance Assessments Reporting Systems (CPARS)
- To track performance reviews from the Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS), DAWSON was looking for a system to monitor quality and facilitate past performance reference selection when building new proposals.
- Accounting System Integration
- DAWSON was looking to integrate a new contract management system with their existing accounting system to synchronize invoice information and automatically trigger notifications, such as an alert when a contract that has been billed 75 percent of its funded total.
- Automatic Identification of Clauses
- Since contracts can include hundreds of clauses, DAWSON needed a system that could upload government-provided contracts and identify and link them to applicable FAR clauses.
Solution Benefits
- Know when amounts billed are approaching the funded totals so appropriate modifications can be executed on time.
- Mirror the structure of contracts to conform to federal government standards and track key data.
- Automate the upload and update of FAR clauses to ensure completeness and accuracy as well as to trigger the necessary contract modifications.
- Ensure compliance with subcontracting goals.
- Trace all contract data to primary contract and related modifications.
- Monitor customer reviews and facilitate customer reference identification for proposals.
- Automated integration with accounting systems and alerts for contract compliance.
- Ensure subcontracts include the required flow-down clauses from prime contracts.
- Automate the identification of contract clauses.
