SD-5 Market ResearchThe purpose of this document is to provide DoD and other Federal personnel involved in the acquisition process with practical guidance on using market research to ensure the acquisition of products and services that will best serve the government??s needs. Specifically, this document is designed for personnel involved with establishing requirements for products or services, such as engineers, technical specialists, project officers, and customers; personnel involved with purchasing products or services, such as contracting officers, contract specialists, and cost analysts; and personnel who support the acquisition process, such as logisticians, testing and quality assurance specialists, and legal counsel.

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Another way to verify a source's claims about a product is to test samples.When it is feasible to do so, personnel should test the product in the field to determine whether it meets perform- ance claims and operates satisfactorily.The military service or component may wish to rotate

the product through several units to get feedback from a number of people.To verify a source's claims about a service, you may be able to visit a user's facility to see the results of the service.

Evaluate the Data

After you've completed the data collection process, you need to evaluate the data to determine whether the information received is sufficient to determine whether the product or service meets the needs of the requirement. It is not uncommon to get incomplete or erroneous data from suppliers. In some cases, you may need to contact an applications, field service, or design engineer for clarification of issues.You may also need to appraise the data using market surveil- lance information, analyzing market trends to fill in missing data. For example, you can estimate the length of a product cycle for a product for which you have no data by analyzing compara- ble products for which data exist.

As a result of your data collection efforts, you may determine that

• a commercial product or service is not feasible,

• commercial products or services meet the need as stated,

• commercial products or services can meet the need if certain requirements are relaxed, or

• commercial products or services could be modified to meet the requirement.

To easily evaluate the data you have gathered about a product or service, you should use a table, database, or spreadsheet. Here, we provide two simple examples.The first is for a product, a hand-held receiver for a global positioning system (GPS); the second is for pest removal service.

Table 3 shows a sample comparison of the characteristics of four GPS hand-held receivers; it also shows the characteristics required by the government. In this example, it's clear that the commercial market can meet all of the government's requirements except for battery life. Fur- ther research may be needed to determine whether it is technologically feasible to meet the re- quirement and what the cost implications are. Perhaps the government user would be willing to trade off this requirement, or perhaps the requirement can be met through other means, such as having the user carry an extra set of batteries. In situations such as these, it is very useful to have an individual who is responsible for the operational requirement on the market investigation team.You may avoid reducing the candidate field or eliminating a commercial solution by relax- ing or deleting the problem requirement if, in the judgment of the user, that is a reasonable

thing to do.

If the user is unwilling to relax or eliminate a particular requirement, then ask the candidates about the feasibility and cost of modifying their product to meet the requirement. Some suppli-