Army expands rollout of new contract writing system

U.S. Army Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS) and the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Procurement (ODASA(P)) are building on the success of the initial launch of the Army Contract Writing System (ACWS) by rolling it out to an additional 400 users across a dozen states and locations outside of the continental United States. By January 2024, the total number of ACWS users will be over 500. 

Since ACWS’ initial rollout in August, the Army contracting workforce has issued 123 contract awards through the system, with total obligations of $41 million.  

ACWS users have provided highly favorable feedback about the system and related training. The Army has held 12 training classes for 379 individuals to date, according to Maria Dunton, procurement analyst and ACWS team lead with the ODASA(P). She shared some comments from recent training feedback surveys: 

“ACWS is one BILLION times better than PD2 [Procurement Desktop-Defense]. And I've been using PD2 for 14 years.” 

“Started using this training to begin an award in ACWS already.” 

"The instructors are great, good interactive dynamic with the class, and they clearly care about providing good quality training to the students, so that they can go out and get the job done.” 

“I can't stress this enough - this training is fantastic, and the instructors are outstanding. Probably the best contracting-related training I've attended in my 12 years in DoD contracting.” 

Dunton said the training program feedback received thus far is “a huge success story for the ACWS program.”  

“It demonstrates we are on the right track with our training strategy,” she said. “We will continue to incorporate feedback from our users into our training and adoption management efforts.” 

In an interview this past August, Steve Edsall, product manager for ACWS at PEO EIS, attributed the system’s success to the close partnership between EIS, ODASA(P) and the solution provider. 

“They have been with us hand in hand throughout this entire process, and they have been integrating their training programs and their functionality and operational wishes throughout,” said Edsall, “so we’ve really been working as a great cohesive team to get the training that the users need ahead of time, so when we actually went live, people were able to use the system instantly.” 

In late 2024, the Army expects to roll out ACWS to an additional 2,000 users from U.S. Army Mission and Installation Contracting Command sites, Army National Guard and other Army Contracting Command sites that receive purchase requisitions via the General Fund Enterprise Business System (GFEBS), pending completion of the GFEBS interface. 

Besides continuing to field and enhance ACWS, EIS recently chaired the Multi-Service Contract Writing Tool Summit in Tysons Corner, Virginia in cooperation with the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and Defense Logistics Agency. The Air Force provided all the services with the underlying contract writing software, and through teaming and coordination, each service is developing capabilities that are useful to all and shareable across the DOD services.