Procurement programs honored

The National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) honored three state procurement programs with the George Cronin Awards for Procurement Excellence at its Annual Conference in Denver on Oct. 3, 2013. Nominees were scored based on innovation, initiative, transferability, service improvement and demonstrable cost reduction. Program submissions from Mississippi, Oklahoma, and New York received top honors this year.

Mississippi – This was the state's first Cronin Award, and they returned home with the title of Gold Award winner. The winning program was titled Procurement Transformation: Driving Efficiency into Business Operations. The program is credited with placing money directly in to the hands of teachers to use for classrooms while eliminating thousands of man hours needed to process purchase orders and checks.

Oklahoma – received the Silver Cronin Award for its submission Multi-State Natural Gas Vehicle OEM Contract. A mutual vision between the governors of Oklahoma and Colorado to procure affordable vehicles that ran on clean natural gas led Oklahoma to take on a cooperative procurement. The aid of the Western States Contracting Alliance (WSCA-NASPO) Cooperative Purchasing Organization helped promote the use of clean natural gas vehicles.

New York – They were named the winner of the Bronze Cronin Award for their submission Hourly Based IT Services. New York State Procurement (NYSPro) created an innovative process to address the need for hourly-based information technology (IT) services by becoming an internally managed service provider for IT services. NYSPro eliminated the need for over 600 individual contracts and now meets the same demand with only 25 vendors.

For more information, please visit www.naspo.org.