Amid a sharp decline the past decade in small businesses within the nation’s defense industrial base, the Defense Department is undertaking a number of initiatives to improve its efforts to work with small companies and make it easier for them to contract with the department, the head of DoD’s small business office said on Wednesday.
Building off recommendations in the DoD Small Business Strategy released in January, the department is creating a unified management approach for its small business programs, Farooq Mitha, director of the DoD Office of Small Business Programs, told the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness.
The department and its components have a lot of small business programs but “Small businesses and even members of the DoD acquisition workforce can find it challenging to understand where to go first and who to contact to find information on available small business programs and opportunities,” Mitha stated in written testimony for the panel.
One new initiative to improve DoD coordination and collaboration of its small business efforts is a small business integration group that Mitha is chairing that includes representatives from the offices of the acquisition and research undersecretaries, the component small business officers, and other industrial base programs. Working together, these representatives will share and leverage the best practices, tools, pathways and expertise they each have to bring more companies into the defense industrial bae, he said.
The department is also conducting a common training curriculum for its small business professionals, Mitha said. These professionals are engaged the in requirements and acquisition planning, and also do outreach to small and large businesses to improve relationships between the government and small business, he said.
To simplify working with DoD, the department is creating a single-entry portal for all small businesses. Mitha said that the existing www.business.defense.gov website is that entry point and will be updated with information and resources to help these businesses navigate the small business offices throughout DoD and provide access to acquisition forecasts and ways to do business with the department.
“This is an unnecessary challenge for a business that is trying to understand where to go first, who to contact, and where to find information on available resources and opportunities,” he said.
Between 2011 and 2020 the number of small businesses in the defense industrial base declined by more than 40 percent, according to the DoD Small Business Strategy.
Mitha said that DoD plans to create new market intelligence tools for its acquisition workforce to do better research on the small business market, track performance of small businesses, and conduct “comparative analytics.”
“Identifying capable small business suppliers through market intelligence data is key to increasing set-asides for small business competition, understanding the supply chain, locating small business manufacturers, and increasing the number of small companies in the defense industrial base,” Mitha said.