UGS Protests NASA's Broken Promise

Being self-employed, I can only roll my eyes at procurement procedures, but UGS and the GAO are miffed at NASA breaking procurement rules:

Unsuccessful bidders claimed NASA was “attempting to establish the [mechanical CAD] and data management products of one vendor ... as the de facto NASA standard without an agency-wide technical assessment and analysis to justify and support this standardization.” The protesters also claimed NASA violated procurement regulations -- reports Patience Wait of GCN.

A year ago, NASA issued a request for quotation for 355 MCAD and data management licenses, plus technical support services. After five weeks, the US$5.2-million contract was awarded to PTC (works out to $14,600 per seat). The losers, UGS and ESCgov (appears to be a partner of UGS), filed protests with GAO. claiming NASA was biased towards PTC in the bidding process. NASA promised to reissue the bid invitation, but then backtracked by going ahead in installing 351 seats anyhow.

It's gets juicy: a complainant claimed that the MCAD software NASA decided to use "could jeopardize NASA’s mission."

Since then, NASA promised to reassess the way future MCAD procurements are handled, and the government has ordered NASA to stop installing PTC seats and to limit license renewals.

What's not clear is whether NASA was already using PTC software. If so, it makes little sense to switch to UGS, and perhaps that's why NASA biased the procurement procedure towards the existing supplier.

Comments

[Kevin Knippa]

This is exactly the tactic that Intergraph applied for years. Intergraph would assume that, because they assisted in the writing of the RFQ they would have the leg up on the competition. If they lost the bid they would sue the agency and essentially force it to award at least part of the contract to Intergraph. Look where Intergraph is now. Does this say anything about the future of UGS?

[John Nolin]

Actually NASA has tried to standardize on Pro/E in the past for its small explorers program, and has a fair number of seats installed.
However, some divisions have difficulty keeping enough Pro/E trained staff on hand and have resorted to using SolidWorks and AutoCAD combinations to get the job done, because that was the experience base of the available staff.
Also, even in Pro/E based projects, large assemblies transfer between teams in STEP files, at which point it doesn't matter as much what design system created it.