Southwest Marine, Inc.; American Systems Engineering

Southwest Marine, Inc.; American Systems Engineering BNUMBER: B-265865.3; B-265865.4 DATE: January 23, 1996 TITLE: Southwest Marine, Inc.; American Systems Engineering Corporation ********************************************************************** REDACTED DECISION A protected decision was issued on the date below and was subject to a GAO Protective Order. This version has been redacted or approved by the parties involved for public release. Matter of:Southwest Marine, Inc.; American Systems Engineering Corporation File: B-265865.3; B-265865.4 Date: January 23, 1996 Peter B. Jones, Esq., and Toni L. Degasperin, Esq., Jones & Donovan, for Southwest Marine, Inc.; and James J. McCullough, Esq., Joel R. Feidelman, Esq., Anne B. Perry, Esq., D. Anthony Trambley, Esq., Lawrence E. Ruggiero, Esq., Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, and Grant L. Clark, Esq., Science Applications International Corporation, for American Systems Engineering Corporation, the protesters. William W. Goodrich, Jr. Esq., Richard J. Webber, Esq., Tenley A. Carp, Esq., and Alison J. Micheli, Esq., Arent Fox, and Charles P. Mead, Jr., Esq., VSE Corporation, for BAV, the interested party. Michael J. Cunningham, Jr., Esq., and David H. Turner, Esq., Department of the Navy, for the agency. Guy R. Pietrovito, Esq., and James A. Spangenberg, Esq., Office of the General Counsel, GAO, participated in the preparation of the decision. DIGEST 1. The destruction of individual evaluators' workpapers and scoring sheets by the procuring agency in a negotiated procurement, although improper, did not make the record inadequate for review by the General Accounting Office (GAO) where the remainder of the record, including the parties' arguments, explanations, and hearing testimony, sufficiently explained the agency's evaluation and source selection decision to allow the parties to present their arguments concerning the reasonableness of the agency's actions and for GAO to review the procurement. 2 In a negotiated, best value procurement in which technical merit was stated to be significantly more important than cost/price, award was properly made to the higher-rated, higher-cost offeror where the agency reasonably evaluated the awardee's proposal as being significantly technically superior to that of the other offerors consistent with the stated evaluation criteria and the source selection official reasonably determined that technical merit of the awardee's proposal outweighed the cost advantages offered by the protesters' lower-rated, lower-cost proposals. 3. Award may properly be made on the basis of initial proposals without conducting discussions where the solicitation incorporated Federal Acquisition Regulation sec. 52.215-16, Alternate III, which informed offerors that the agency intended to make award on the basis of initial proposals, and the contracting officer reasonably determined that discussions were not necessary to select the offer that represented the best value to the government, given the technical superiority of the awardee's proposal and the contracting officer's reasonable determination that no other offeror could improve its proposal to the level of the awardee's. DECISION Southwest Marine, Inc. (SWM) and American Systems Engineering Corporation (AMSEC) protest the award of a contract to BAV, a newly-formed joint venture of VSE Corporation and Booz, Allen & Hamilton, Inc., under request for proposals (RFP) No. N00140-95-R-F021, issued by the Department of the Navy, for engineering, technical, and logistics support services for various classes of decommissioned Navy ships to be sold or otherwise transferred to foreign governments. SWM and AMSEC protest the Navy's technical evaluation, cost/technical tradeoff analysis, and failure to conduct discussions. We deny the protests. The United States is selling, leasing, or otherwise transferring decommissioned Navy ships to foreign governments under the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program; these ships are from various classes of ships, such as FF-1052 and FFG-7 frigates and DDG-2 cruisers, that will no longer be within the Navy's active inventory. The purpose of this procurement is to provide a single contract under which foreign recipients of the Navy's decommissioned ships can order a broad range of reactivation, overhaul, maintenance, training, and life-cycle support services for the ships and their systems. A cost-plus-award-fee, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract for 1 base year with 9 option years is contemplated by the RFP. The RFP estimated a total labor effort of approximately $24M[1] man-hours.