Unfortunately, some procurement officers see SMEs as difficult to work with. They like to work with one organization. In our experience--Jeff and our colleagues at CABiNET--we often come up against references that basically forbid us from going forward to respond to these RFPs. It makes it very difficult for us to compete.
What we would like to see happen at OSME is for us to have a voice to represent the small organizations. It would bring our concerns forward and fight on our behalf. When you're dealing with procurement, we want a voice. It's not to say that we need special treatment from procurement. All we want is to be able to compete against these larger organizations.
We keep our overhead low. We are very effective in keeping our costs low, and we are very, very competitive and innovative, and we want to be able to present our ideas going forward.