Public procurement: “What’s under the street?”

The other day, on a stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue about a half mile southeast of the U.S. Capitol building, an excavator was peeling a square of pavement off the ground. The Capitol’s vast dome—a global symbol of power and governance—loomed even at this distance. But my toddler (whose curiosity about the world around her had recently exploded because of her switch from a rear-facing car seat to a forward-facing one) had eyes only for the excavator.

“Dad, what’s under the street?”

A change of pace from our usual morning daycare drop-off drive, I responded excitedly. “Well, there’s lots of stuff! The Metro is down there, and there are also all sorts of pipes so every house can get water, and wires so everyone can get electricity and lights, and watch their favorite shows, and tons of other stuff that helps make the city work!”

“Oh.”

“And that crew with the excavator is probably going down there to fix something or make it all work even better.”

“Oh.”

“Pretty cool right?” No response. Her focus returned to the talking Moana story book in her lap.

Even blocks from the seat of power, much of government’s most critical work—and by extension the work of local, state and federal procurement professionals—happens below the surface.

Surfacing performance insights
It doesn’t take long, when working in the public procurement space, to have your own “what’s under the street” moment. The efforts of government procurement professionals across the country are complex, critical (occasionally these efforts are a matter of life and death) and generally unheralded. Procurement teams are highly skilled, but their responsibilities are incredibly broad. With a wave of retirements and in the face of budget cuts, they are often tasked with managing that complexity with fewer resources than ever. The result? Procurement leadership is often forced to make difficult decisions about what to prioritize. And more often than not, sourcing, contracting and order fulfillment take precedence over post-award activities like contract and vendor performance management.

One state CPO joked to my colleagues, “Congrats on your new contract. We’ll talk to you in five years.” And while a set-it-and-forget-it approach may turn out fine most of the time, it opens the door to unanticipated performance failures, perhaps even critical ones.

I recently connected with a colleague about her time working in food procurement for Philadelphia. She told the story of the longtime meal vendor for many of the city’s after-school and summer programs.

In what I’d call a case of sole-source-by-proxy, the meal program had gotten so complex over time that this vendor, Preferred Meals, faced zero competition in the bid process. The lack of competition and therefore the lack of threat that they could lose their contract led to a dramatic drop in the quality of their service. Meals began to be shipped from out of state. Meals would occasionally come frozen beyond edibility or otherwise spoiled.

What didn’t happen was the surfacing of performance feedback in a structured way. If feedback had been shared and procurement had had a way to get that feedback—from students, teachers, program managers, principals, the department of parks and rec—perhaps they could have adjusted. But this was a time when those inner workings faltered.

Students—often coming from poor communities, as these were many of the participants in the city programs—were struggling to get the critical calories and nutrients that they needed to learn and grow.

The situation came to a head when the supplier suddenly shuttered, leaving the city scrambling and with little leverage to negotiate better prices and quality.

This is the kind of story you hear when procurement teams don’t have access to supplier performance data. It reflects a blind spot, a poor performance time-bomb ticking within the vast operations of a government. It’s like waiting for a water main to burst beneath, say, Pennsylvania Avenue, instead of fixing a crack as soon as the leak is detected. But new tools, like Procurated’s Canary product, are designed to pick up and then boost signal, giving procurement teams the heads up that something might be wrong.

With these new tools, end-users and agency customers are given a clear mechanism to provide feedback. Contract managers receive this feedback in a structured, aggregated way. The technology leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to better identify recurring problems so they can be addressed before they blow up into a crisis. And most important of all, it gives procurement teams the ability to manage these critical post-award activities, so they no longer have to fall by the wayside. Now it is up to the procurement leaders to adapt their efforts and realize they have the data and the power to make a real difference post-award.

The tech-enabled perfect performance future
last week, my daughter stood over a metro grate just southeast of D.C.’s eastern market Metro station. She leaned close to it and whispered, “Hi trains.”

This September, she’ll be attending the city’s public pre-k, which includes free breakfast for all students. The stakes in procurement are very real for me, just like they are real for every person in this country even if they’ve never “looked under the street” themselves.

Working in procurement tech, I appreciate the amazing work done by procurement professionals. I’m proud to be a part of the cottage industry supporting their efforts, empowering them with the performance data and data analytics tools to make the best decisions for their constituents every day.

Steve Isaac is the director of marketing for Procurated, helping government procurement professionals to leverage the power of peer insights in their procurement processes. He has spent a decade working with tech startups across the fields of procurement, spatial data science, and nonprofit fundraising and communications. Isaac lives in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C., with his wife, Lorna, and his daughter, Quinn.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the Q2 2024 issue of Government Procurement.