OIT Times: (Guest Editorial) OIT's Streamlined Solicitations Earn Hammer Award

March 24, 2001

Photo of Theo
Johnson - Guest Editor

by Theo Johnson
Office of Industrial Technologies

The National Partnership for Reinventing Government recently bestowed OIT and DOE Idaho Operations Office with a ammer Awardone of the highest honors a federal government program can receive.

The Hammer Award is given to teams that help create a government that works better, costs less, and gets results that Americans care about. Our team received this award for successfully streamlining the application process for financial assistanceaking government work better and cost less.

Here in OIT, our #1 goal is to help improve our nation industrial energy efficiency. But we can achieve that goal without the active involvement of firms large and small, independent inventors, universities, labs, and many others. When we realized that burdensome, complex, unnecessary red tape was impeding this involvement, we took action.

We joined the Idaho Operations Office in a team effort to make the process of requesting financial assistance simpler, more accessible, and less expensive for our customers. We reduced the application for financial assistance from over 70 pages to 20 pages. We reduced the number of application forms from over ten to one. This cut the number of pages of forms that each partner must complete from 25 pages to one and helped greatly reduce costs and proposal preparation time for our customers. The annual savings to our customers in industry, labs, and universities is estimated in the millions of dollars.

The streamlined solicitation process is now standard for all of OIT financial assistance awards. We think it will greatly increase the number and quality of proposals we receive for improving industrial energy efficiency. And this is just the beginninge will continue to listen to our customers and respond.