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How to Search the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR)
by: ozietww on
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2010 Time: 9:37 PM
The United States Government is the largest single customer in the world, purchasing trillions of dollars of goods and services each year.
Companies that sell goods or services to a federal agency need to comply with over 1800 pages of rules in the US Government's Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR).
Every supply contract for US Federal Agencies is governed by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR). This affects hundreds of thousands of acquisition and supply contracts every year.
While this regulation is intended to provide a central set of rules to govern all federal acquisition, the shear size of the 1800 page PDF document makes it very difficult for users to search FAR quickly to find vital definitions, information and cross-references.
Until now, finding and cross-referencing information in the mass of FAR rules has been difficult and extremely time-consuming.
Hundreds of thousands of Federal agency procurement specialists and private sector suppliers rely daily on manual searches of large printed copies of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR).
Traditional searches are time consuming and functionally limited. These printed copies of FAR also quickly become out of date when rules change or are updated.
Despite these difficulties in being able to search FAR, it is vital that suppliers to US Federal Agencies can rapidly find and understand key information in the Federation Acquisition Regulation.
By law, acquisition and supply contracts with the Federal government must comply with FAR. The regulations also contain standard contract clauses which procurement documentation simply refers to or assumes as being legally part of a supply contract to a federal agency.
The US Federal Government does provide basic MS Word & HTML versions of the Federal Acquisition Regulation but users face the same difficulties because both versions are structured like an online version of a printed document.
While users can access the information on the Government's FAR website, the static nature of the document makes it incredibly difficult to read on screen and to find definitions for key terms when the definitions may be defined hundreds of pages away from the page the reader is exploring.
The multi-billion dollar annual supply industry to the US Federal Government needs a new approach to access, navigation and search of the federal acquisition regulation. Private sector best practice for major project procurement documentation offers promise to transform the way the private sector and public sector interact with this Federal regulation so central to US domestic trade.
Major projects worldwide are transforming critical documents like contracts and legislation to an Intelligent Document Format (IDF™) that brings documents to life with user-friendly cross-linking, navigation, pop-up definitions, annotations on the fly, version histories, and unprecedented intelligent search.
Companies supplying goods or services to US Federal Agencies should seek out these industry best practice capabilities in online resources to make searching FAR an intelligent process not a daily headache.
About the Author
Glyn Bryson is Senior Vice President of Business Development at Affinitext. Affinitext brings documents to life online to simplify and reduce risks for major projects procurement. US Government suppliers and federal agencies can search Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) online at http://www.faronline.com.
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