How to Use GenAI to Quickly Mine CPARS Reports

Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS) reports are more than performance records; they’re the government’s unfiltered opinion of your past work. These reports shape how government proposal evaluators view your credibility, capability, and value in every bid.

Winning capture managers create a strategic advantage by mining their CPARS for data and insights to sharpen company self-assessments and build winning narratives. The most successful companies don’t guess where they stand; they use CPARS to confront reality, spot weaknesses, and double down on strengths.

The Challenge of Mining CPARS Data

Finding and mining the most relevant reports for your capture efforts can be challenging due to the combination of structured text (narrative) and unstructured text (for example, field entries from databases such as SAM.gov) within these reports. CPARS report formats and content follow guidance provided by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)^[1] and the General Services Administration (GSA)^[2]. Companies use techniques such as file naming conventions, folder hierarchy, and metadata tagging for their CPARS reports to facilitate finding content relevant for capture self-assessment and other purposes. For example, companies can capture their CPARS reports as flat files (like .docx or .pdf) in a file management system like SharePoint. None of these techniques, however, enables capture managers to quickly find and prioritize those CPARS reports that contain the information most relevant to a particular topic or need.

How to Solve the Problem of Extracting CPARS Data Efficiently

Capture managers can solve the problem of finding relevant CPARS report information by using a combination of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and a complementary technology that is often provided with GenAI platforms, called retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Alone, GenAI is extremely powerful for (1) ingesting and analyzing textual information from diverse sources, and (2) writing high-quality, custom content in response to user-specified inputs. When integrated into the GenAI platform, RAG uses GenAI prompts to quickly find and retrieve relevant information from document libraries. That information is then combined with the user request in the GenAI prompt. By combining RAG and GenAI in their platforms, vendors improve response accuracy and relevance with information sourced from your corporate holdings.

Lohfeld Consulting’s Proof of Concept for Mining CPARS Reports

Lohfeld Consulting has created a proof of concept for mining and analyzing CPARS reports using an automated assistant in Procurement Science’s Awarded.AI GenAI platform. The resulting analysis makes capture managers aware of investments needed to address areas where the company has received Unsatisfactory ratings for their contract performance. The proof of concept is a single action for identifying and performing thematic analysis on areas of underperformance on a set of CPARS reports, as follows:

• RAG searches the company’s CPARS library and identifies relevant CPARS reports with evaluation areas that received a rating of Unsatisfactory. This eliminates the need to manually search unstructured data in the CPARS reports.
• RAG retrieves the Assessing Official Narratives for those CPARS report areas that received a rating of Unsatisfactory. This eliminates the need to manually extract the relevant Assessing Official Narratives from the selected set of CPARS.
• GenAI performs a thematic analysis of the Official Assessment Narratives based on similar/related comments from multiple evaluation areas with ratings of Unsatisfactory. The trend analysis reveals patterns in performance issues, while sentiment analysis provides a comprehensive view of customer feedback.
• GenAI suggests investments and innovations to address areas for improvement, giving the capture manager possible solutions and areas for discussion with customer decision-makers.
• GenAI creates a report summarizing the findings. The report includes a table listing the contract title, evaluation area, and verbatim Official Assessment Narrative for all the Unsatisfactory ratings.

This automated assistant provides capture managers with insight into the data and perceptions that customers use in the past performance information portion of proposal evaluation. This understanding creates a point of departure for self-assessment and the development of improvement strategies.

Conclusions

GenAI’s facility in writing makes it easy to overlook its ability to ingest and analyze information from diverse sources. GenAI also has enormous, untapped potential to support capture managers in a wide range of unstructured research and assessment tasks.

The proof of concept described here shows one specific use case for applying GenAI and RAG to conduct a capture self-assessment. This capability offers a fast, automated approach to searching, retrieving, and analyzing relevant information. If you would like to see a demonstration of the AI Assistant or learn more about Lohfeld GenAI Training Classes, please contact us.

Lohfeld Consulting can help you move beyond the obvious to harness the power of GenAI for both capture and proposal tasks. Consider putting GenAI adoption and education at the core of your overall growth program.

Relevant Information

• Why GenAI Needs Guidance: Like Managing a New Intern

• 50 Use Cases for GenAI Implementation Victory Now

• VIDEO: Generative AI for Proposal Development: Writing the Proposal of the Future

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Sources:

[1] https://www.cpars.gov/cparsweb/assets/documents/CPARS-Guidance.pdf

[2] https://www.cpars.gov/cparsweb/assets/documents/CPARS-EvaluationDataDictionary.pdf

By Bruce Feldman, Vice President, Lohfeld Consulting Group

Lohfeld Consulting Group has proven results specializing in helping companies create winning captures and proposals. As the premier capture and proposal services consulting firm focused exclusively on government markets, we provide expert assistance to government contractors in Capture Planning and Strategy, Proposal Management and Writing, Capture and Proposal Process and Infrastructure, and Training. In the last 3 years, we’ve supported over 550 proposals winning more than $170B for our clients—including the Top 10 government contractors. Lohfeld Consulting Group is your “go-to” capture and proposal source! Start winning by contacting us at www.lohfeldconsulting.com and join us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube^(TM).