The GSA SmartPay program provides government agencies with commercial charge card based procurement and payment solutions through “Master Contracts.” The period of performance for the Master Contract is 10 years and is due to expire November 29, 2008. My agency, along with our customers, currently uses the program to meet their needs through Travel, Procurement, and Fleet cards.
We have already selected a provider for purchase, fleet, and travel charge card services for the next Master Contract starting November 30, 2008. The next Master Contact is called SmartPay 2. Agency representatives took part in an evaluation panel and conducted a thorough evaluation of the participating banks’ card program services as part of the GSA SmartPay 2 Contract.
We have developed a Transition Team, in which I am a member of for travel, to ensure a seamless transition to the new SmartPay 2 program. We have developed a Status Report and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) regarding the SmartPay 2 transition. Both documents are viewed by the Transition Team as communication tools and will be maintained throughout the Transition Phase of this project on several of our customer access pages.
The Status Report will contain such items as:
- Transition Team Current Activities: This block will contain the planned activities the Transition Team will be involved in during the status reporting period.
- Next Steps: This block will contain key project activities that will take place during the project, but beyond the next reporting period.
- Customer Actions: For this phase of the project, we wanted to ensure that our customers were aware of any activities that would be expected from them.
- Challenges: This block will contain any key challenges/risks of the Transition Phase.
- FAQ to remember: This block will contain a key FAQ as a teaser. Our hope is the FAQ selected will prompt our customers to visit the FAQs that will be posted on their customer access page.
- Key Accomplishments: This block will document any key activities/milestones that the Transition Team completes during the previous reporting periods.
A final step that the Transition Team will perform is a small SmartPay 2 pilot (approximately 200 accounts). By performing this pilot, we will be able to see what the challenges will be, if any manual intervention will be necessary, and to work out all the ‘bugs’ prior to the much larger transition in November (approximately 13,800 accounts).
by Susan Garrett
The contents of this message are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the Government or my agency.