Effective 11:59 pm on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, no new vendor registrations can be submitted to the federal government. Central Contractor Registration (CCR) is closing and will become part of SAM — System for Award Management — on Monday morning, July 30, 2012.
Thus, until the morning of July 30, 2012, vendors will not be able to initiate a new registration or modify an existing one.
Any registrations in process will be on hold until SAM goes live the morning of July 30, 2012. If a firm is in the middle of a registration, the data submitted will be migrated to SAM.
Similarly, all existing vendor registrations — both active and inactive — will be migrated to SAM.
When it is time to renew a registration, vendors should go to SAM.gov, create a SAM user account, and follow the online instructions to validate and update the information. Vendors only need to register for a user account in SAM when it is time to begin updating their current registration. Vendors do not need to do anything right away.
If a vendor’s CCR record was scheduled to expire between July 16, 2012 and October 15, 2012, the government is extending that expiration date by 90 days. Vendors will receive an e-mail notification from CCR when their expiration date is extended. Vendors will then receive standard e-mail reminders to update their records based on their new expiration date. Those future e-mail notifications will come from SAM.
CCR is just the first federal database to be transferred to SAM. Federal Agency Registration (FedReg), the Online Representations and Certifications Application (ORCA), and the Excluded Parties List System (EPLS) also will be migrated into SAM. One advantage to the creation of SAM is that it will reduce the number of passwords users need to remember, reduce the number of systems needed to enter and interact with, and reduce data redundancy by sharing the data across the award lifecycle.
Visit SAM.gov to learn more, or feel free to contact your nearest GTPAC procurement counselor for advice. Our contact information is at http://gtpac.org/team-directory.