Case Background
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) STARS Office managed the NIH-wide STOPS contract that provided scientific, healthcare, technical, professional, and clinic research needs to the NIH. The STOPS contract had approximately 2200 contractors on current task orders and the client had to contend with the following challenges:
- Client had to transition to a new NIMH STARS contract by July 2021
- STOPS contract was sole sourced to a single vendor while the STARS contract had to be competitively sourced among multiple vendors
- The current operating environment was highly paper and email based with many ad-hoc processes that utilized significant levels of staff time, space, and resources
- Previous attempts to automate this process were unsuccessful causing schedule risk
Implementation Overview
Scope IT Consulting assisted National Institute of Mental Health to design, build and support state of the art Government Acquisition Management system on Appian platform. As part of the contract, Scope IT Consulting built the acquisition system to manage New Task Orders, Task Order Revision, Funding Request, Travel Request, Contractor Feedback, and Vendor Management process for all the 27 NIH Institutes and Centers (ICs). This new system streamlined the paper and email-based process to an online, mobile-ready solution to be accessed anywhere at any time.
Results
System went live within 6 months of contract award. NIMH was able to support over 2000 contractors in the new system within few months after go live. Scope IT was provided with “Excellent” CPARS rating, and awarded the “NIMH Director’s Award” for 2021.
