combined_synopsis_solicitation Mar-May RTI.docx

This is a combined synopsis / solicitation for commercial items provided in accordance with the format in Subpart 12.6 as supplemented with additional information included in this notice. This announcement constitutes the only solicitation; proposals are being requested and a written solicitation will not be issued. Solicitation W912LN-20-Q-0004 is issued as a Request for Quotes and incorporates provisions and clauses in effect through Federal Acquisition Circular 05-89.

This Procurement is a total small business size for procurement, the NAICS code is 722320 with size standard $8.0 million. Contractors must state in their quotes their business size for this NAICS code. USPFO for Vermont, VT-PFO-PC, has a Firm Fixed Price requirement for a vendor to provide catered meals for the Regional Training Institute at Camp Johnson in Colchester, VT 05446. There are two separate courses, which run from March 26-April 17, 2020 and April 30-May 22, 2020. See attached PWS and Headcount documents for specific details.

Attached documents in Contracting Opportunities:

Provisions and Clauses for RTI Catering.docx RTI-PWS-Menu MAR-MAY 2020.doc MAR - APR 20 124 RTI Headcount.xlsx APR - MAY 20 124 RTI Headcount.xlsx QASP.docx

The Government does not accept responsibility for non-receipt of quotes. It is the vendor's responsibility to request and receive confirmation of quote receipt. All Questions regarding this solicitation must be submitted NO LATER THAN 11:00 a.m. eastern standard time 28 February 2020 to Ruth D’Amico at ruth.s.damico.civ@mail.mil. Questions with Answers will be posted NLT 5:00 pm. EST or sooner if possible.

Proposals must be in written form addressing all factors requested below for Technical, Past Performance, and Price. Please send all proposals electronically (emailed to ruth.s.damico.civ@mail.mil or posted to Beta Sam) to arrive NO LATER THAN 11:00 a.m. eastern standard time, 4 March 2020. Vendors will also reference the solicitation number when submitting a bid. All responsible sources may submit an offer which, if received in a timely manner, will be considered.

Vendor required submission documents:

1) Technical proposal

2) Past performance references

3) Pricing structure using format identified below

4) Acknowledgement of Amendments to the solicitation, which includes amendments for questions and answers.

5) Completion of applicable certifications and representations via System for Award Management. (FAR 52.232-3, Offeror Representations and certifications – Commercial items (Dec 2016) Alternate (Oct 2014)).

Please submit quotes in accordance with the following pricing structure:

*In terms of product, IDT Meals are the exact same as other meals. They are set out in different CLINs, however, because different funding applies to these items.

The provision 52.212-1, Instructions to Offerors, applies to this acquisition.

Effective 1 June 1998, contractors must be registered in the System for Award Management (SAM), prior to receiving any contract award. You can register in SAM via the internet at https://www.sam.gov. Refer to Clause 52.212-3 below.

Basis of Award:

The government will award a firm fixed price contract resulting from this solicitation to a responsible vendor whose quote conforms to this solicitation and is considered most advantageous to the Government, based on technical approach to the work, past performance and price. Technical capabilities and past performance when combined are more important than price. The Government intends to evaluate offers and award a contract without discussions with offerors. Therefore, the offeror’s initial offer should contain the offeror’s best terms from a price and technical standpoint. However, the Government reserves the right to conduct discussions if later determined by the Contracting Officer to be necessary. The Government may reject any or all offers if such action is in the public interest and accept other than the lowest offer from an offeror providing a best value proposal.

Evaluation Approach: 52.212-2 EVALUATION--COMMERCIAL ITEMS (OCT 2014)

(a) The Government will award a contract resulting from this solicitation to the responsible offeror whose offer conforms to the solicitation that will be most advantageous to the Government, price and other factors considered. A tradeoff process is being used when it may be in the best interest of the Government to consider award to other than the lowest priced offeror or other than the highest technically rated offeror. The following factors shall be used to evaluate offers:

(b) Technical Approach: Proposals shall address the planned service approach for providing the requested catered meals and contingency planning considerations that ensure continuous operations during unforeseen circumstances; weather or other acts of nature or manmade events that could cause delays or failure to provide required services. The technical approach is not a concurrence with or a cut and paste of the PWS requirements, nor is it a capability statement, it is the vendors planned approach to providing the catered meal services

(c) Past Performance: Potential vendors will provide three past performance references and any proposed subcontracting relationships. Past performance will be evaluated based on customer satisfaction, quality of food prepared, timeliness and compliance with delivery and/or performance schedule current or within the last eighteen months for jobs that are similar in size and duration to this requirement. This information will be checked for reliability and dependability.

In conducting the Past Performance evaluations, the Government reserves the right to use both the information provided in the offeror’s Past Performance references and information obtained from other sources available to the Government, to include, but not limited to, the Contract Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS) including Past Performance Information Retrieval System (PPIRS), Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System (FAPIIS), Electronic Subcontract Reporting System (eSRS), or other databases; interviews with Program Managers, Contracting Officers and Fee Determining Officials; the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), and commercial sources.

1. FACTORS TO BE EVALUATED:

Award will be made to the offeror whose proposal is most advantageous to the Government based upon an assessment of the evaluation factors described below.

Factor 1: Technical Capability: The Technical Capability will be evaluated on the capabilities and strength of proposal based on how it applies to the Performance Work Statement (PWS). A detailed explanation of the criteria for the evaluation is set forth in the “Evaluation Approach, Paragraph (b)” of this section. During evaluation of each proposal, the Government will assign the Technical factor an adjectival rating and write a narrative evaluation reflecting the identified findings.

Factor 2: Past Performance: Each offeror’s past performance will be reviewed using a list of references and/or contract numbers to determine relevancy and confidence assessment.

Factor 3: Cost/Price: The resulting award will be a Firm Fixed Price. Price reasonableness may be utilized in the evaluation of the Firm-Fixed Price effort.

Evaluation Approach:

All proposals shall be evaluated by a Source Selection Team (SST) consisting of, at a minimum, the contracting officer, requiring activity representative, and other personnel as deemed necessary.

a. The overarching evaluation approach for all factors is as follows:

1) Adequacy of Response. All factors are evaluated for adequacy of response (whether the offeror's proposal fully satisfies the requirements set forth in the solicitation/RFQ).

2) Feasibility of Approach. The proposal will be evaluated to determine whether the offeror's proposal is workable and capable of achieving the required end results within the required schedule.

b. The Technical factor evaluates the offeror’s proposal for the basic contract period that at least meets the minimum Acceptable levels of the overall requirement. A rating of Marginal could indicate a lack of understanding concerning mission requirements and may result in the entire proposal receiving an unfavorable rating and/or elimination from the competitive range.

Evaluation of Technical factor: The Technical factor will be reviewed according to whether the proposal demonstrates that the offeror understands the requirement, has the necessary expertise to achieve it, and its proposal is adequately designed to achieve required results. The Technical approach and related risk are evaluated using the combined technical/risk rating table below, which considers risk in conjunction with strengths, weaknesses, uncertainties, and deficiencies in determining technical ratings.

TABLE 1 – COMBINED TECHNICAL/RISK RATINGS

c. Cost/Price Factor. Adjectival ratings shall not be used for offerors’ Price proposals. The Government will fully evaluate all priced Contract Line Item Numbers (CLINs) for award. The government will evaluate the total sum of the CLIN total proposed prices. While the grand total will be used as the basis for evaluating proposals, the offerors proposed unit prices must be based on fully burdened rates. The Offeror’s Cost/Price proposal will be evaluated as follows.

1). FFP Evaluation. For a price to be fair and reasonable, it must represent a price to the Government that a prudent person would pay in the conduct of competitive business. The Offeror’s proposed fixed-price CLINs may be evaluated, using one or more of the techniques described in FAR 15.404-1 in order to determine if they are fair and reasonable

2) Overall Price Proposal Evaluation: The overall Cost/Price proposal will evaluated for the following:

a) Compliance: The Cost/Price proposal submitted by the Offeror will be evaluated for compliance based upon the submission requirements contained in the instructions.

b) Unbalanced Pricing: The Offeror’s overall Cost/Price proposal will be evaluated for unbalanced pricing as defined in FAR 15.404-1(g). An offer may be rejected if the contracting officer determines that the lack of balance poses an unacceptable risk to the Government (see FAR 15.404-1(g)(1) through FAR 15.404-1(g)(3)).

c) Errors: The Offeror’s Cost/Price proposal will be reviewed for errors. The Offeror may be given an opportunity to clarify certain aspects of their proposal at the sole discretion of the Contracting Officer.

d. Past Performance Factor. The Government will evaluate the offeror’s record of past and current performance to ascertain the probability of successfully performing the required efforts of the PWS.

1) Evaluation of past performance shall be done by review of information provided by the offeror’s references and previous contracts of the same size and scope to this PWS.

2) The Government will focus its inquiries on the offeror’s (and major subcontractor’s) record of performance as it relates to all solicitation requirements, including cost, schedule, and past performance. Absent any recent and relevant past performance history or when the performance record is so sparse that no meaningful confidence assessment rating can be reasonably assigned, the offeror will be assigned a “neutral confidence rating” and its proposal will not be evaluated either favorably or unfavorably on past performance. The Government may use data provided by the offeror in its proposal and data obtained from other sources, including data in Government files or data obtained through interviews with personnel familiar with the contractor and their current and past performance under Federal, State or Local government or commercial contracts for same or similar services.

3) Offerors shall submit all Government and/or commercial contracts for the prime offeror and each major subcontractor in performance or awarded during the past 18 months, from the issue date of this RFP, which are relevant to the efforts required by this RFP. The Government may consider a wide array of information from a variety of sources, but is not compelled to rely on all of the information available.

4) The past performance factor considers each offeror’s demonstrated recent and relevant record of performance in supplying services similar to the contract requirements. There are three aspects to the past performance evaluation: recency, relevancy, and quality.

(a) RECENCY: The first aspect is to evaluate the recency of the offeror’s past performance. Recency is generally expressed as a time period during which past performance references are considered relevant, and is critical to establishing the relevancy of past performance information.

(b) RELEVANCY: The second aspect is to determine how relevant a recent effort accomplished by the offeror is to the effort to be acquired through the source selection. Relevancy is not separately rated; however, the following criteria (see Table 2) will be used to establish what is relevant, which shall include similarity of service/support, complexity, dollar value, contract type, and degree of subcontract/teaming.

Table 2 - Past Performance Relevancy Ratings

(c) QUALITY ASSESSMENT: The third aspect assesses the overall quality of the offeror’s past performance. Documented results from references, interviews, CPARS, and other sources form the support and basis for this assessment.

5) Performance Confidence Assessment: The Government will utilize the Performance Confidence Assessment (see Table 3 below) to select the most appropriate confidence level for each Offeror.

TABLE 3 - Performance Confidence Assessments

(End of provision)

52.212-3 Offeror Representations and Certifications-Commercial Items. OCT 2018

The Offeror shall complete only paragraph (b) of this provision if the Offeror has completed the annual representations and certification electronically in the System for Award Management (SAM) accessed through https://www.sam.gov. If the Offeror has not completed the annual representations and certifications electronically, the Offeror shall complete only paragraphs (c) through (u)) of this provision.

(b)

(1) Annual Representations and Certifications. Any changes provided by the Offeror in paragraph (b)(2) of this provision do not automatically change the representations and certifications in SAM

(2) The offeror has completed the annual representations and certifications electronically in SAM accessed through http://www.sam.gov. After reviewing SAM information, the Offeror verifies by submission of this offer that the representations and certifications currently posted electronically at FAR 52.212-3, Offeror Representations and Certifications-Commercial Items, have been entered or updated in the last 12 months, are current, accurate, complete, and applicable to this solicitation (including the business size standard applicable to the NAICS code referenced for this solicitation), at the time this offer is submitted and are incorporated in this offer by reference (see FAR 4.1201), except for paragraphs ______________.

[Offeror to identify the applicable paragraphs at (c) through (u) of this provision that the offeror has completed for the purposes of this solicitation only, if any.

These amended representation(s) and/or certification(s) are also incorporated in this offer and are current, accurate, and complete as of the date of this offer.

Any changes provided by the offeror are applicable to this solicitation only, and do not result in an update to the representations and certifications posted electronically on SAM.]