Demo concerns emerge in fight for $1B Army business system contract

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New filings from the protester Groundswell allege both an improper evaluation process and technical misrepresentation on the Army's part.

Newly-unsealed filings offer new insights into the dispute involving the Army, Groundswell and Accenture's U.S. federal subsidiary over what could be an eight-year, $1 billion contract to revamp several of the service branch's business systems.

Groundswell, under the name of its Telesto business unit, went to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in October with a lawsuit arguing Army didn’t follow the rules for other transaction authority procurements. Groundswell also claims the Army favored the incumbent, and eventual winner, in Accenture Federal Services throughout the process.

The Army is using the OTA to consolidate five business systems into a single platform built on SAP in a program called Army Enterprise Business Systems - Convergency, or EBS-C. The systems all use SAP currently, but the Army sees the consolidation as a way of improving performance and data analytics.

The new filings, which were unsealed Tuesday, include a redacted version of Groundswell’s motion for judgement and several exhibits.

The Army and Accenture Federal now have a deadline of Feb. 7 to file their responses and their own motion for judgement.

Among several allegations, Groundswell claims that AFS faked a demo in step four of the competition and that the Army ignored this.

“The evidence of Accenture’s lack of integration is a ground for setting aside the award for multiple reasons,” Groundswell argues in the motion. “It shows that the Army failed to conduct a rational process that could detect something critically important.”

Groundswell became suspicious when its technical lead asked for access to SAP GUI, which is needed to configure the engagement layer for real-time integration into the SAP core. According to Groundswell, the Army didn’t understand what they were asking for.

This caused Groundswell to “become concerned that Accenture was not providing real-time integration in its demo as SAP GUI would be needed by any bidder seeking to do so,” the motion states.

The unsealed exhibits include a copy of an email exchange between Groundswell and a Justice Department attorney representing the Army.

The exchange indicates the Army gave its lawyer excerpts, which the service branch claims are proof that AFS did not fake the demo. The details of those excerpts are redacted in the exhibit.

But those excerpts did little to convince Groundswell’s attorney.

“I’m afraid we cannot draw that conclusion from the script excerpts you have identified for us,” wrote Hammish Hume, the company’s attorney with Boies Schiller Flexner LLP.

Hume asked the Justice Department for more details. But the Justice lawyer, Chritopher Berridge, said he did not have a “more granular explanation.”

A second argument Groundswell is making gets into the minutiae of OTA procurements and the rules that govern their usage.

For an agency to use an OTA, it must explain how it is following one of four conditions. The Army picked the condition that “at least one nontraditional defense contractor” participate to a significant extent in the project.

Groundswell qualified as a nontraditional defense contractor on its own, but Accenture Federal would need a teammate to meet that condition. Groundswell argues the Army never verified that Accenture Federal had that teammate.

“The Army’s actions were, at a minimum, arbitrary and capricious because it failed to make a reasoned determination that the NDC requirement was satisfied, instead merely copying and pasting Accenture’s unsubstantiated assertions,” the Groundswell motion states.

After that statement, a significant portion of Groundswell’s motion is redacted. So more details on its allegations are not available.

Groundswell repeats allegations from its original complaint that the Army changed evaluation and process during the procurement to favor Accenture.

Groundswell also complained about the inadequate Army debriefing after Accenture Federal won the contract: “To this day, it has neve explained to [Groundswell] why it lost.”

The company wants the court to overturn the Army’s decision to award Accenture Federal the contract and reimburse Groundswell for bid and proposal costs.

Come early February, we get to see more of Army’s and Accenture Federal’s side of the story.