Agencies have directed over 12% – a record amount – of their spending on common products like laptops and building materials to these exemplary solutions. Image: kentoh/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffUse of category management—a strategy dating back several Presidential administrations seeking to leverage the government’s buying power by centralizing some types of procurement–yielded savings of $60 billion over the last four years, OMB has said.
“Category management has redefined efficiency in government procurement, ensuring the federal government is buying as an enterprise. These savings have been reinvested into critical programs, enhancing the delivery of public services while reducing taxpayer burdens. Category management exemplifies how smart policy and collaboration can drive meaningful change, ensuring the government operates more effectively and responsibly,” OMB deputy director for management Jason Miller said in a post.
He said that during the Biden administration the approach became part of the “better contracting initiative” as well as its made in America initiative “and promoted the participation of small-disadvantaged businesses to diversify and build the Government’s supplier base.”
He said that more than half of the cost avoidance during the Biden administration came through the use of best-in-class designations used to denote contracts that meet rigorous category management performance criteria. “Agencies have directed over 12% – a record amount – of their spending on common products like laptops and building materials to these exemplary solutions and, at the same time, further increased their cost avoidance by gaining access to bulk discounts, improving procurement efficiency, and helping the environment,” he said.
He cited as examples buying generic pharmaceuticals for the DoD and VA through the joint national contracts program, collaboration across agencies to identify and solve common manufacturer-specific challenges on technology procurements, and the longstanding city pairs program operated by GSA to achieve discounts on airfares for official travel government-wide.
He added: “New initiatives, like the Hi-Def Initiative, are making it even easier to use data to drive smarter decisions. One new tool, the Procurement Co-Pilot, allows federal procurement officers to conduct market research using real-time data on the government’s prices paid, helping them make more informed purchasing decisions. It’s already being used by over 6,000 acquisition professionals across the government.”
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