U.S. General Services Administration
The Verified Products Portal Aims to Improve GSA’s Buying and Selling Experience
Post filed in: Acquisition
Great things are on the horizon, as the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) continues to make progress under the Federal Marketplace (FMP) initiative. In the coming months, you will be hearing more information on our roll out of the Verified Products Portal (VPP), a key component of GSA’s Catalog Management modernization.
The VPP is an exciting step towards facilitating GSA’s vision of providing a superior buying and selling experience for the federal marketplace. This new manufacturer and wholesaler facing portal will contain authoritative product content, including standardized manufacturer names, part numbers, and specifications for commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products. In the long term, VPP data will be used to standardize contractor catalogs, ensuring products across GSA marketplaces are accurately represented.
In addition, the VPP will capture supplier authorization information. For products offered by participating manufacturers, this will enable automated supplier authorization enforcement and reduce the burden on authorized resellers to provide individual letters of supply. Supplier authorization information will come directly from manufacturers and wholesalers, which will reduce supply chain risk. This is a win for both industry partners and customers, and further supports our work to improve and establish FAS acquisition programs as the trusted source across government.
Full implementation of the VPP will allow the FAS acquisition workforce to quickly and easily identify unauthorized products both pre- and post-award for participating manufacturers. Unauthorized products can then either be removed from consideration in new offers and modifications or deleted from existing contracts. This will free up the FAS acquisition workforce to focus on other value-added activities to even further improve our supplier and customer experience.
In late November, GSA launched a prototype of the VPP and several large and small manufacturers and wholesalers have already created VPP accounts, including Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Clover Imaging Group, and National Industries for the Blind. Over the next few months, the VPP will continue onboarding a limited number of participating manufacturers and wholesalers and additional testing will be conducted before a full-scale launch by the end of FY 21 Q2.
For the latest VPP information, be sure to follow the GSA Catalog Management Group on GSA Interact.