Can you explain the daily Softshare Search email and what all the bid match statistic headings mean, such as procure, award, FTO, small, etc.?
If your account has been set up to participate in the Bid Match program, then each day an e-mail titled "Softshare Search <current date>" is sent to the e-mail address designated for your center's bid match activities. The e-mail looks similar to the one shown next, with your client profile numbers in the first column.
The primary purpose of this e-mail is to give you a quick overview of client bid match activity across various bid sources for the current day as well as for the month to date (MTD). At the start of each calendar month, the MTD figures are reset to zero.
Note: As stated above, this report is e-mailed to the address designated as the primary address for bid match communications. But additional addresses can be added. If you are currently not receiving this report and would like to, contact OutreachSystems' technical support group to have your e-mail address added to your account’s distribution list.
Although the report is fairly self explanatory with the help of the legend found at the bottom of the report, there are some areas of the report that would benefit from further explanation. These areas are discussed in the following sections.
"Co" Column (Inactive Clients)
Clients who are inactivated during the month remain on the report for the remainder of the month, but at the start of a new month, the inactive client(s) are removed from the report. For example, in the previous graphic, an asterisk (*) in this column for client VTA0039 tells us that this client is no longer an active bid match client, but we will continue to see their MTD figures for audit purposes through the end of the month.
"Small" Column
This column used to refer to all small purchases of less than $25,000 from the Defense Logistics Agency, but this is no longer the case. Now it comprises a wide variety of bid opportunities published by federal agencies such as the Small Business Administration Subcontracting Network (SBA SUB-Net), the U.S. Army’s Tank-automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM) Procurement Network, and Navy Electronic Commerce Online (NECO). State and Local bids are not included in this heading, so it truly represents all miscellaneous federal contracts not published in the FedBizOpps.
"EDI" Column
The total volume of EDI opportunities has dwindled since the late 1990s when the US Government initiated the FACNET (Federal Acquisition Computer Network) system. At that time, all federal purchases were to be advertised using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), but this goal was never quite realized. These days, only a few agencies continue to use EDI as their means of advertising procurement opportunities. The few opportunities that are still published via EDI and matched to your client search profiles are counted in the EDI column.
For more information on the various government sources that OutreachSystems retrieves bid opportunities from, view our other popular resources on this topic:
- Web page (general breakdown of bid opportunities): http://www.outreachsystems.com/cats/bidmatch
- Web page (Web sites monitored under OutreachSystems' USABID database): http://www.outreachsystems.com/usabid