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Contract Law Essay example

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DETERMINING
PAST PERFORMANCE
VERSUS
EXPERIENCE

Contracting Officers within the Federal Government are tasked with negotiating contracts for goods and services with the contractor that is best able to satisfy that particular requirement in terms of quality, timeliness and cost. Best value analysis strives to apply good business judgement to making source selection decisions. It seeks to isolate technical differences between proposals to determine which offer represents the best value to the customer. The Federal Government is steadily moving away from awarding contracts purely on the basis of low price and opting to employ evaluation factors such as past performance, management capabilities and technical superiority. Confidence …show more content…

In addition to looking at workmanship, past-performance evaluations also include judgments on an offeror's reputation for cooperative behavior. Past performance may pertain to any number of things such including:
(1) Quality of supplies delivered or services rendered, in terms of compliance with adequate specifications and statements of work;
(2) Timeliness of performance, taking into account all excusable delays;
(3) Price, in terms of initial reasonableness and control of exigencies (i.e., changes and claims);
(4) Reasonable compliance with other contract terms and conditions;
(5) Effective management of the administrative aspects of performance, such as communicating and performing routine clerical tasks;
(6) Cooperation with, and assistance to, the customer in routine matters and when confronted by unexpected difficulties;
(7) Business integrity;
(8) Breadth;
(9) Depth; and
(10) Relevancy.
Although it is safe to assume that most contracting professionals would consider that experience relates to "what" a contractor has done and past performance relates to "how well" the "what" was performed. The federal procurement regulation does not specifically differentiate between experience and past performance. In Nash (2001) it is argued that "experience is sometimes ignored and, when considered, has often been

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