SPE4A520R0150-QandA-8Jul20.pdf

SPE4A5-20-R-0150

Questions and Answers

Posted July 8, 2020

1. SOW Section C 2.7.3 VSM, states, “The Military Shipping Label (MSL) and carrier information/shipping instructions should be available in VSM within 24 hours of initial shipment registry.”

This implies orders will be picked, packed and ready for shipping, at which point the contractor will attempt to ship each order, only to find the MSL and carrier label are not immediately available, and they should be available within 24 hours. With the high daily volume of orders shipping against this contract, this labor-intensive process will result in hundreds of orders sitting at the contractor’s location, unable to ship because of the minimum 24-hour delay in the government providing MSL and Carrier labels.

Question: Will DLA consider establishing an interface the contractor can use once an order is ready to ship that will immediately provide MSL and Carrier labels? This would eliminate the 24-hour minimum wait time to ship orders and drastically reduce the wait time for customers to receive their orders.

VSM is the interface that will immediately provide MSL and Carrier labels and labels when orders are entered into the VSM system. Examples of when labels may not be immediately available and take up to 24 hours include but are not limited to shipping address changes affiliated with Foreign Military Sales (FMS), and shipments to Consolidated Container Points (CCP) and Navy vessels. Additionally, if the Contractor is late shipping orders (past the Contract Delivery Date of the order), a shipping address change may have occurred causing a delay in label availability.

2. SOW Section C 10.1, Supply Chain Management. The Government's table of Supply Chain Management Functions indicates that the offeror will not be responsible for Warehousing, Planning & Forecasting, and Shelf-Life Management.

Question: If there is no minimum order quantity and an order is received for below the purchasing unit of measure, will the contractor be required to inventory the difference the amount the customer ordered vs. the amount in the purchasing unit of measure? Example: a customer orders one washer and the quantity unit pack is 100 washers. Is it the Government's intention that the contractor would ship the one washer ordered but would be left with 99 washers they would be required to stock as part of inventory? If so, this would contradict the table on pg. 22. Please clarify?

Customers will order as DLA procures, based on each item’s Quantity Unit Pack (QUP) found on the Packaging Tabs (1c-Core and 2c-Alternative) of Appendix C. Therefore, given the example above, if the customer orders washers at a quantity of 1 and the QUP is 100, then the customer will receive 1 pack of 100 washers.