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Monthly Archives: April 2012

How important are NAICS and PSC to winning federal contracts.

By
April 17, 2012
Federal Procurement Data System, NAICS, North American Industry Classification System, PSC

Small business owners can improve their ability to get federal contracts if they understand the nature and use of the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) and Product and Service Codes.  The purposes of these codes are to collect, analyze and publish statistical data on economic activity in the United States, Mexico and Canada. The Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) uses these codes to track federal procurement history

NAICS is a two through six-digit hierarchical classification code system offering five levels of detail. The first two digits designate the economic sector, the third digit designates the subsector, the fourth digit designates the industry group, the fifth digit designates the NAICS industry, and the sixth digit designates the national industry. The Product and Service Codes (PSC) are a four digit code system to further describe products, services and research and development purchases by the USG

The report below describes the FY 2012 USG Procurement by NAICS_PSC at the economic sector level. Further breakdown of procurement by NAICS and PSC is available from the FPDS data set located at data.gov.  Four hundred and forty (440) Agency Contracting Offices completed 588,946 transactions with 69,014 vendors in the amount of $49 billion. These transactions were classified using 922 NAICS and 9,733 PSC.

Small business can use these classifications to determine how much the USG buys and which agency contracting offices make the purchase. The FPDS is a good data set to build a federal marketing plan.

FY 2012 USG Procurement by NAICS_PSC

Data.gov and Federal Contracts: An Overview

By
April 10, 2012
Research

The key questions asked by small business owners who want to market their business to the United States Government (USG) are 1)  Does the federal government buy my company’s products/services? 2) WHO in the agency contracting office buys? 3) How did they make the purchase? And 4) What are my competitors doing? The answers to these questions provide the first step in the path to obtaining federal contracts. The USG spends over $500 billion a year buying goods and services from commercial entities. The data sets contained in Data.gov can help small business find business opportunities and market to targeted agency contracting offices

There are over 14 data sets in Data.gov that report USG procurement. The key data sets include e-buy Awards for Fiscal Year 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006 and 2007; GSA elibrary Schedule and Contracts; Schedule Sales Query Report Generation System, Schedule Sales Query Raw Data; North American Industry Classification System; NAICS Matrix for Active GSA Schedules and GSA GWAC’s; PSC Matrix for Active GSA Schedules and GSA GWAC’s; Federal Business Opportunity Data; USA Spending Contracts and Purchases and the Federal Procurement Data System. The challenge for small business is getting the information from these data sets into actionable formats or reports. This requires expertise on mining data and understanding how this data works to their benefit.

 Federal Contract Intelligence Service has taken some of the data from the above data sets and created three sample  reports designed to help small businesses market their products/service to agency contracting offices. Please see sample reports (http://fedcontractintel.com/sample-reports-for-101-and-301/ ) .

The data sets in Data.gov provide a tremendous amount of data for commercial use. The challenge is mining the data to create actionable reports for small business. This is the first blog in a series on the benefit of using Data.gov to help small business get federal contracts. Other blogs will explore the North American Industrial Classification System and Federal Procurement Data System. Stay tune.