DME to Protest Contract Award to Raydon

(MoneyWatch)  Last month the U.S. Army awarded Raydon a contract to build military vehicle simulators to support training. Raydon has designed and built several of these types of trainers and convoy simulators for the Army and Marine Corps. Now The Orlando Sentinell reports that losing bidder DME is protesting the award of the $46 million contract. DME has protested to the GAO which is the middle level of protest saying that the Army did not evaluate the proposals evenly or fairly. They submitted a cheaper bid then Raydon. Under the normal terms of this kind of protest work must stop for up to 100 days while GAO collects information and then rules. As we wrote earlier protests continue to become more common as there are less big contracts available for a smaller number of vendors.