The Standard Procurement System


The Standard Procurement System is a software suite providing front-office business services to Acquisition professionals in the United States Department of Defense.

Program History

SPS is an outgrowth of the DoD Corporate Information Management initiatives in the early 1990s, and is intended to provide standard business processes and data management across disparate acquisition communities, including:
The Standard Procurement System initiative began in 1994 with a directive from the Director of Defense Procurement to standardize the then approximately 70 acquisition systems in use on a single platform. In August 1996, the SPS contract was awarded through a competitive process to American Management Systems. The contract directed AMS to build the Standard Procurement System through an incremental process on top of the company's existing Procurement Desktop - Defense application.
SPS is one of the first DoD software acquisitions using Federal Acquisition Regulation Part 12 - Acquisition of Commercial Items rules. One of the major drivers behind SPS was the use of Commercial off-the-shelf, or COTS, software. The software is licensed rather than purchased outright, and at the time marked a major shift in acquisition strategy for DoD. While DoD had previous experience in licensing software, it largely revolved around either desktop computing or back-end servers. SPS is a business system and is licensed for 43,000 contracting officers and other acquisition professionals at DoD sites world-wide.
The deployment of SPS met with several challenges, including a stop-development order in 2002 from the US Government Accountability Office. The program resumed after establishing an internal requirements board, automating its integration capabilities, improving product documentation, and implementing a shift from a client-server architecture to a Web application architecture.
The SPS program has received several awards, including the Top Fed 100 award from Federal Computer Week, the Grace Hopper Technology Leadership Award, and CIO Magazine's CIO Enterprise Value Award.
To date, SPS has been deployed on more than 23,000 desktops worldwide, and processed more than $131 billion in fiscal year 2006, up from $59.0 billion in FY 2004