Hearing Committee on Government Reform: Service Oriented Streamlining: Rethinking the Way GSA Does Business

HEARING COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM: SERVICE ORIENTED STREAMLINING: RETHINKING THE WAY GSA DOES BUSINESS

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Mr. Lynch.

Mr. Lynch. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I want to thank the panel as well for helping the committee with its work.

Just from a customer standpoint, I am a firm believer that GSA needs to reform, so I might be out of step with some of my
Democratic colleagues in that respect. But I definitely believe GSA is in need of reform. And that is just from me as a customer of GSA.

What I would like to just ask of any of the panelists, and especially of Mr. Waszily, the statement here in your testimony
regarding the organizational structure of GSA with respect to the proposed merger, it says what we would caution against is a
structure popular among some conglomerate corporations in the 1970's and shown over time to be ineffective. By this we mean a unified structure centrally controlled, rigidly imposing the same structure upon each of its business units and measuring them by the same set of metrics. That is what we want to caution against.

But isn't that what we have right now? Isn't that what we have with GSA, a bureaucracy that largely reflects organization of times past and not necessarily reflective of modern technology and the needs of the customer?

Mr. Waszily. Well, sir, I think we can certainly streamline what we have right now. What we were suggesting to guard v against, we look at three major supply and acquisition structures that we have within GSA right now. We have the Multiple Award Schedules, one of our largest programs that is pretty much the customers can come in, tap into the program, and place their own orders. FSS is willing to help them and has come up with some innovative solutions, but they can also use it as a self-service vehicle. We also have the Global Supply system, which is a ready supply to move anywhere in the world on critical items. That type of system is different, it has a different set of metrics than does the Schedules program. And then we have the FTS programs, which are sort of, if you will, cradle-to-grave type of acquisition services, particularly in the technology area.

And what we were suggesting was that we believe that we need to preserve those three types of programs, and they should
be evaluated as standalone programs, because one set of metrics for all three of them would probably lead to misleading
results. For example, the supply operation, dollar for dollar, costs more to maintain than say the General Supply Schedule and
the Multiple Awards.

Mr. Lynch. I know we are short on time here. Again in your testimony, sir, you reflect the fact that the dollar amount of sales has increased dramatically over the last few years, and that is some sign of success. I am not sure I buy into that rather simple reasoning.

More to my point, has there been any diagnostic conducted by GSA to see what the attitudes and what the perceptions of
your customers are regarding the services that they receive from GSA? Is there something really that goes out to your customer that says how do you think we are doing?

Mr. Perry. Yes. If I may answer that question, sir.

Mr. Lynch. Sure.

Mr. Perry. We definitely do that. We do that on an annual basis in all of our service areas. We do a number of things. First of all----

Mr. Lynch. I have never received one, and I would love to give my opinion of what I think GSA is doing for their customers, and I am just completely unaware of that.

Mr. Perry. Then we will definitely do that.

We ask very specific questions of people who are in GSA facilities or people who order GSA supplies or services what is the level of satisfaction they have with our service levels and suggestions that they have for our improvement, and we followup with each of those customers to make sure that is happening. Our customer satisfaction levels are not where we want them to
be, but they are increasing annually. We do that.

In addition, we have a number of structured reports--we just completed one recently--where we use a third-party. We use
various third parties, but a different entity did this review for us, having more interviews. Instead of a paper survey, we used an interview situation with customers to understand where we are meeting their expectations and where we are not.

Aside from those kinds of assessments, we also conduct what we call customer service visits, where either people from our
national office or people from our regional offices meet with customers, their management teams, and we go through the spectrum of services we are providing for them today, have them identify for us where, again, we are meeting their
expectations, where we are not. Most importantly, in those kind of discussions we talk about items that are on the horizon, strategic directions in which they are moving where they will need our assistance to acquire technology, what have you.

And based on those customer service visits, we develop individual customer account management plans or actions plans
that talk about what services we are going to deliver and who is responsible to do what by when. So that gives us a much better opportunity to focus in on individual customer needs and have customers hold us accountable for meeting them.

Mr. Lynch. Well, I appreciate that. I just wish that the Members of Congress were part of that survey group that you reach out to, because we are actually elected by the taxpayers. We have a special status and a different perspective in representing taxpayers, so we might have some useful input into how you are doing your job, how efficient and how responsive GSA is operating, not only with respect to us, but also to your customer base as well, your other customer base. I am going to yield back to Ms. Norton, if that is all right. Thank you.

Thank you, I appreciate it.

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