The explosive trace detection (ETD) system that Morpho Detection proposed for a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) competition won by Implant Sciences Corp. [IMSC] failed to meet the agency’s minimum requirements for false alarm rate and would have needed additional software development and possibly even engineering change proposals if it had been selected, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says in its legal decision rejecting Morpho’s protest of the award to Implant.
TSA last November awarded Implant a potential $162 million contract for the desktop ETDs but a protest by Morpho Detection, one of two losing vendors for the award, held up work on the contract until GAO rejected the protest earlier this month, allowing Implant to begin work to deliver 1,170 of its QS-B220 ETDs. The other losing vendor is only identified as Offeror A in the GAO’s legal decision, which was published after the announcement that the protest was denied.
Smiths Detection, part of Britain’s Smiths Group, was likely Offeror A as only it and Morpho Detection had previously won contracts to supply TSA with ETD systems. Morpho Detection is part of France’s Safran Group.
GAO’s legal decision says that three factors were used in evaluating the proposals, technical capability, delivery capability, and price, with the two non-price factors combined more important than price and technical capability more important than delivery capability. The legal decision says that when TSA field tested a version of Morpho’s software, it found that the false alarm rate did not meet the minimum requirements set forth in the Request for Proposal (RFP).
“TSA assigned the proposal a weakness because of this failure to meet the RFP’s requirements,” according to GAO’s decision. “The agency assigned the Morpho proposal a risk for this same reason, finding that the unacceptable false alarm rate, while potentially correctible, could have a negative impact on airport operations.”
GAO also says that TSA had concerns about Morpho having to make post-award fixes to its ETD if the company received the contract.
“Specifically, TSA was concerned that the false alarm rate failure (along with several other minor performance issues associated with the Morpho ETD), while correctible, would require additional software development and tweaking of the software and hardware after award to improve performance of the system, and also would require engineering change proposals and deployment of the software to fielded systems,” GAO says. “The agency concluded that this presented what amounted to a potential post-award risk to the government because the Morpho ETD demonstrated numerous operational issues that would impact performance of the Morpho ETDs, and would also need to be corrected by future system updates.”
According to the GAO, the TSA evaluated Implant’s ETD as outstanding for technical capability, good for delivery capability, with a price proposal of $23.3 million. Morpho’s ETD was rated as good for technical capability, outstanding for delivery capability. Offeror A’s proposal was rated outstanding for both technical and delivery capability. Both Morpho’s and Offeror A’s price proposals are redacted in the GAO decision.
GAO, citing TSA, says that Implant’s and Offeror A’s price proposals were at a premium compared with Morpho’s.
For Implant Sciences the contract win is a huge deal, giving it production work with the most important customer in the ETD market, which in turn boosts its status in that market. The company believes the TSA order will expand its opportunities for more sales to domestic and international customers.