Evaluation of GSA Efforts To Implement Life Cycle Costing for Procurement of Commercial Products

Life Cycle Costing (LCC) is a procurement technique for evaluating the total cost of a product over its useful life. LCC provides a means to insure that procurements are most advantageous to the government in regards to price and other factors considered in accordance with Federal Procurement Regulations. The General Services Administration (GSA) has had the responsibility of coordinating and publicizing governmentwide LCC efforts.

Because of the substantial savings attributable to LCC procurements, the accelerated development of LCC techniques for additional items is warranted. GSA could improve its leadership role regarding governmentwide implementation of LCC, and could expand the use of LCC to include the procurement of its own needs. One of the impediments to the expanded use of LCC is the lack of governmentwide guidelines to provide uniform application of data that are used in LCC calculations. LCC requires top-management support because the procurements depart from traditional practices and require more time to prepare and evaluate.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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