InterOcean Systems, Inc., B-290916, October 8, 2002

B-290916 Oct 08, 2002 Jump To VIEW DECISION RELATED PAGES GAO CONTACTS Highlights DIGEST Agency evaluation of protester's product design under negotiated commercial item acquisition is unobjectionable where record establishes that the evaluation was reasonably based on assessment of how well the proposed product met the agency's stated requirements. InterOcean contends that its proposal was misevaluated and that under a proper evaluation. InterOcean rather than SOSI would have been in line for award of the contract. Only the award of CLIN No. 0001 for OMS's is at issue here. /1/ The RFP provided for a minimum base order of four OMS units for delivery by September 2002. An alternate to deliver units that use a newer satellite voice and data service that is currently in the process of being phased in by NOAA. View Decision InterOcean Systems, Inc., B-290916, October 8, 2002 DIGEST Attorneys DECISION InterOcean Systems, Inc. protests the award of a contract for certain oceanographic monitoring stations (OMS) to Sound Ocean Systems, Inc. (SOSI) under request for proposals (RFP) No. AB1330-02-RP-0073, issued by the United States Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). InterOcean contends that its proposal was misevaluated and that under a proper evaluation, InterOcean rather than SOSI would have been in line for award of the contract. We deny the protest. The RFP, issued on May 31, 2002, as a negotiated commercial item acquisition under Part 12 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), with an amended June 7 closing time, sought proposals for four different types of oceanographic instruments to provide support for the Coral Reef Ecosystem Investigation program run by the Honolulu laboratory of NOAA's Marine Fisheries Service. The solicitation contemplated the award of individual indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts for each type of instrument under separate contract line items (CLIN), with individual vendors eligible for award of more than one CLIN; only the award of CLIN No. 0001 for OMS's is at issue here. /1/ The RFP provided for a minimum base order of four OMS units for delivery by September 2002, and options consisting of a maximum of 11 additional OMS's during the years 2003 to 2005, plus the refurbishment of previously delivered units, an alternate to deliver units that use a newer satellite voice and data service that is currently in the process of being phased in by NOAA, plus various add-on features and shipping and training. Agency Report (AR) at 1. The RFP provided for award on a best-value basis considering technical capability, past performance and price, with the combination of the first two factors substantially more important than price, and stated that price would be calculated on the basis of the total price for all options plus the total price for the basic requirement. RFP Sec. 14. The agency received five proposals for CLIN No. 0001 by the closing time. Based on an evaluation by the source evaluation board (SEB), only the InterOcean and SOSI proposals were included in the competitive range. After the conduct of discussions, the last final proposal revisions were submitted on June 26. SOSI's final evaluated price was $1,222,713, which was slightly lower than InterOcean's price of $1,235,158; SOSI's proposal received a final technical and past performance evaluation score of 59.8 (out of a possible maximum of 80 points), which was slightly higher than InterOcean's score of 55.5. /2/ AR, Tab 19, SEB Final Evaluation Results Memo, at 1. The SEB rollup narrative and the scoring of the proposals reflect that under both the technical and past performance factors, InterOcean's proposal was evaluated by all of the evaluators as very good or excellent, while SOSI's proposal received evaluations of good, very good or excellent. The SEB recommendation, which was adopted by the contracting officer, was that award be made to SOSI as representing the best value because "the SOSI product [was rated] slightly higher and . . . the SOSI package is . . . less expensive." AR, Tab 23, SEB Recommendation Memorandum, at 3. In particular, the SEB found that: "The benefits and features of the systems proposed by SOSI and [InterOcean] are very comparable and the close technical evaluation scores reflect this. Both products share many similar design features . . . ." Id. at 2. The SEB stated that it "was particularly concerned about the [InterOcean} 3-strut bridle" with respect to the difficulties associated with attaching the bridle just prior to deployment, or with transporting the unit if it was assembled prior to loading the buoys on board for initial transport. In contrast, "the SOSI product is delivered ready-to-deploy . . . on a special pallet designed to help secure the buoy on the deck of the ship during transit to the deployment site." Id. at 2-3.