“In some ways it’s amazing, because you know that the work that you’re doing — which was always related to the public good — is now saving lives on a daily basis. But it’s also stressful, because if you can’t get something it’s really tragic. You feel desperate all the time.”
welcome to everyone my name is Kay I amfrom open contracting partnership andfor those of you who are less familiarwith open contracting partnership we area nonprofit that works in the UnitedStates and abroad to make publiccontracting more efficient open anddeliver better results for everyone wework with governments civil society andthe private sector and as we’ve beensupporting our partners over these lastfew weeks on emergency procurement we’velearned just how important the role ofopen and efficient procurement is forhelping to manage this crisis and whenwe came together in Aspen it was soclear to us that there was an urgentneed for a space for a conversation withmembers from across the procurementecosystem about how we are respondingfor code to cope at 19 and every dayit’s more apparent that the fiscalimpact of coab at 19 is unprecedented inthese times we really must make the mostout of our limited public money that wehave to effectively fight the virusprotect our populations as well as veryimportantly to rebuild our economy weare very eager to hear from our amazingselection of panelists and all of youabout the challenges that you’reexperiencing and the practices that arehelping you to get better resultsespecially around open data transparencyand collaboration quick overview of ouragenda the first half of our call willbe a discussion with our chart ofpanelists and then we’re going to try tohold back at least 20 minutes for anopen conversation with all of you thisis not a webinar we really intend forthis to be an open space for us to havea conversation and collaborate we feelthat there are so many great people onthe call today and we want to make surethat we hear your voices and all thatyou have to share and contribute soquick ground rules we know that there’sa lot of people on the call today so weask that you follow our guidance to makesure that it’s a welcome and safe spacefor everyone we invite you to make agenerous use of the chat function andthe sidebars youget your comments in and questions wealso would love it if you wouldcontribute to the document which we’vebeen sharing around earlier with ournotes and and when the time comes to askour panelists questions I’ll be keepingtrack of who is asking what and duringthe open conversation I will be makingsure that I am met and we are callingpeople in the order that they volunteerwe also ask that you keep your commentsand questions brief given just how manypeople are in our call todaysavvy everyone has a chance and lastlyas as is our new reality since we’re onsoon please keep yourself on you if youare not talking now that all thathousekeeping is out of the wayI am honored to introduce you toJennifer Bradley the founding directorof the Aspen Institute for the Centerfor urban innovation who will set outthe framework context for the call todaythanks so much kay I really appreciatethe opportunity to be here I’m extremelygrateful to all of our panelists whohave made the time in this incrediblybusy and urgent period that we’re livingin to talk about the importance ofprocurement the Center for urbaninnovation works with leaders in citygovernment nonprofits philanthropies andthe private sector to make sure thatlocal innovation agendas are alignedwith inclusion and equity imperatives wewere drawn to procurement as a topicbecause procurement is essential to bothinnovation and equity and procurement isparticularly in the spotlight these daysand under great pressure as citygovernments are working very hard to getthe emergency equipment that we needwe’re so glad to work with OCT on thiscall to help folks understand whatresponses are working now to getessential supplies and servicesdelivered and we also want to understandwhere responses are falling short andhow to close the gap particularly onquestions of equity often I think theapproach that that many people have toequity is that it’s something that youcan do in good timebut in case of emergency it’s all aboutsort of efficiency and power purchasingbut particularly given that equityimplications of who’s being hit hardestby Kovac 19 both economically and in ahealth perspective we understand thatequity can’t wait equity has to be apart of everything so I’m particularlyinterested in hearing how governmentsare trying to make sure that theyfulfill their equity commitments duringthis emergency time and finally we wantto learn about what the emergency isteaching us that can guide how localgovernments buy services and suppliesduring the recovery and afterwards canthis crisis cede lessons for localgovernments and the larger ecosystem ofsmall business and procurement to bemore flexible more transparent morecollaborative and more equitable so I’mextremely excited for this discussiontoday and we’ll turn it back over to Kaygreat Thank You Jennifer now we reallydo have a terrific group of paneliststoday so I’m going to ask you tointroduce yourselves and let us knowwhat you have been doing to keep seeingduring these crazy times and let’s getstarted with you better hey everyone myname is Betty Medina I’m the CEO andco-founder at iris we buildcollaborative platforms to engage thepublic from we have the government toResidence what am i doing to stay sane Ibought this peloton before this crisisand it was the best purchase that I madeso far I’m writing that thing every dayso that’s keeping me sane wonderful andJennifer from New York City hi goodafternoon thanks for inviting the cityof New York happy to be here torepresent us I’m from the mayor’s officeof contract services and our officeoversees about 20 billion dollars worthof annual procurement that’s across 40city agencies we have a team of over6,000 procurement staff across the citywe have 15,000 vendors and slightly morethan that actually who are registered todo business with the cityso the scope of our work is quite broadand we are currently pursuing technologyinitiatives to digitize procurementacross the city of New Yorkwhile we are also supporting the city inour kovat relief response I amparticular oversee policy andpartnerships inside mosques and thatmeans that I’m working to cultivaterelationships with our vendorcommunities as Jennifer flagged equitybeing a particular interest we spend alot of time working with mwbes as wellas human service nonprofits which we’llget to I think in a little bit when westart talking about our response interms of what keeps me sane honestly thework is tremendous right now having thethe perspective that we have in the cityhaving a structure having so much to doevery day helps to keep me keep memotivated keep us motivated keep usmoving a glass of wine often helps and Iagree with beta that peloton especiallytheir new online apps are welcomedistraction great and Jennifer is Danjoining us today or not yeah I thinkit’s just nice to on the phonemmm all right so in that case it is overto Skye hi everyone Skye Kelley founderand CEO of a bazaar we are a procurementsourcing vendor registration and acertification platform all combined intoone like a LinkedIn for the supply chainwith a special emphasis on helping smallbusinesses I’m especially minority andwomen-owned businesses contract withgovernments at the local level and afederal you did this again as thatLinkedIn for the supply chain so what’skeeping me saying these days it’s hardto say saying it really is let me justput that out there I think one of thethings that’s helping is that we reallyyou are we are able to help our localgovernments able to go online anddigitized in a time and fashion and veryquickly when they need it most we areable to help small businesses which asall of you know small businesses arereally suffering right now especiallyminority and women-owned businesses theyare suffering the most and so being ableto provide that both that voice both atthe local level and assistance as wellas now at the federal level being ableto share the experiences of our smallbusinesses and advocate on behalf ofthem and make sure that we are movinginto this new era is really helpingoutside of that I don’t have a peloton Iactually hate exercise bikes it’s justit doesn’t work for me but I havestarted to do online workout classes inthe last couple of days I’m gonna behonest not before then so that is that’swhat’s helping that’s helping great andMichael Angelo’s here yes I’m here sorryI am sorry I’ve been a little bit crazythis morning so am I just supposed tointroduce myself just enjoy yourself yepkeep going and then I’m such a zoomNewby I’m terrible at this sorry my nameis Michael oh I’m the purchasing agentand general manager for the internalservices department for the County ofLos Angeles I have only been with thecounty for about a year I am NOT sayingright now so I’m not doing anything tokeep myself saying and very happy to beinteracting with OCP and Jennifer who isthe best facilitator I’ve ever seen inaction sky a good friend and all of youand Jennifer who I love who I hired andone day will hire me and thank you forinviting me well that’s it that’s anintrowe are also very excited to have all ofyou with us really is it a wonderfulpanel and our next terrific panelist isMario everyone I’m Mario Reed I’m aformer public servant and co-founder ofcopra care we’re a mission drivenstartup that supports more transparentefficient and inclusive publicprocurement especially focused at thelocal level and we do that by helpinglocal governments find and sharecontracts across the country yeah Ithink everyone sanity has become arelative thing I agree with the winehappening oftentimes a little bitearlier in the evening but yeah myhusband and I got a puppy back inJanuary which feels like years ago andhe’s been a huge source of entertainmentfor us those and a good excuse also toget outside for some socially distancefresh air and exercise he’s also madesome guest appearances on our zoom teammeetings on Cobra cure so he’soccasionally chimes in there as wellhe’s welcome to contribute to thismeeting as well if that happens Gregyou’re the last one hi I’m Greg wass andwith the government performance lab atthe Harvard Kennedy School the GPLconducts research and provides technicalassistance to state and localgovernments and how they can improve theresults that they achieve for theirconstituents particularly throughcontracting I want to shout out to OscarHernandez who’s in the audience herefrom OCP for inviting me to join today’spanel thanks Oscar good to see you andlet’s see to stay sane I guess I’dbecome a bit of a farmer we’ve beengrowing our own sprouts and we kind of asprout starter and we just planted somedill outside got some good weather it’svery cool so we do miss people but we’recommuning with our plants here that’sgreat so now that we’ve talked about allthe things that are keeping us sane I’mafraid we’re gonna have to go back intothe craziness that is our currentreality and I think that no one isbetter prepared to speak about just thechallengeand the real craziness of these timesthen Jennifer is based in New York Cityso Jennifer my first question is for youwe would really love to hear about youron the ground perspective I’m sure thatwe could talk a whole hour about thisreallybut yeah we’re just working on andseeing in New York City yeah for sureum I guess there’s a few ways ofthinking about it there’s the nuts andbolts challenges in the weeds technicalpieces such as sourcing PPE I mean we’reall familiar with the hourly newsbroadcasts around our blog howeveryou’re catching your information aroundthe struggles with sourcing ventilatorstesting now so across the board that’sbeen challenging we experienced it evenin the most sort of basic way and justtrying to get masks and gloves justacross the the world really folks arestretched on trying to get thoseresources so you have some of thattechnical challenges that you’re seeingevery day on the ground and trying to becreative and trying to move quicklybecause lives literally depends on itand then there are some sort of biggerstructural challenges that are changingand surfacing every day one is theeconomic financial challenges that we’refacing there’s a loss in tax revenuethere’s high unemployment how do youdetermine which services to maintainwhich services to modify which ones needto be cut in the city of New York asit’s true for many of the cities acrossthe country human services are deliveredby nonprofits but they’re essentially abranch of the government and so how doyou ensure that you maintain thoseservices you maintain thoseorganizations they’re important now andthey’re going to be important when weget through this period of time andmoving forward so how do you think aboutthat given the economic climate and theother piece that is sort of a challengeand one that we’re trying we always tryto grapple with and we’re coming up withnew ways of addressing it here iscommunication so how do you make surethat you’re communicating with yourvendors how do you make sure that you’reopening up lines of communication withsuppliers how do youyou create across city agencies how doyou communicate within City Hallfiguring it out there are creative waysfolks are moving we’ve we arerepositioning internally in order torespond to the crisis so understandingwho to talk to how to talk to them howto get them into a virtual room and withproviders we’re doing that through acentralized teamit’s the c19 HHS response team it is agroup of folks from mocksfrom our Office of Management and Budgetfrom City Hall teams deputy mayor teamswho come together to look at the sectoracross issue areas and create guidanceand information and channels forcommunication so that we can shareimmediately when we know things areshifting we can hear immediately fromthem when they need support it’s hard todeliver bad news there’s a lot of badnews being delivered but it has to bedelivered and we have to try to worktogether to figure out how to getthrough ityouthank you that I and from I think onbehalf of everyone on the call we wishyou the best as you confront this crisisMichael we’d love to also get theon-the-ground story in LA Countysorry I’m still trying to figurethis works so yes I think Jennifer hiton all of the big issues that we’re alsofacing we I actually just recently hadto initiate a purchasing freeze acrossacross the county we have a spendingfreeze as well we everything that we’vebeen doing in terms of the response tokovat has been extremely expensive andunlike you know the federal governmentor unlike even New York City we don’thave an our budgets only about thirtyfour billion which seems like a lotexcept it’s not the the on-the-groundstuff is interesting maybe I’ll go sinceJennifer hit like sort of the high-levelpieces which I think are very importantfor people to understand the I’ll go alittle bit a level below which is thatin LA I think this is the urgency andthe the level of sort of stress andintensity is something that I don’tthink anyone on my team or anyone thatI’ve spoken to across the region interms of the sourcing and procurement ofthese necessary PPEsor any anything else that we need interms of the response has been like noone’s no one’s ever experienced anythinglike this and I know New York inparticular has experienced it like ahundredfold right we’ve been lucky herewe are this is our second week of whatwas expected to be our peak and ourprojected deaths are lower now than theywere even three weeks ago were at arelatively decent Hospital capacity forICU beds as well as emergency room bedsand overall capacity but we did like itjust a couple weeks ago and if I if youcatch me looking down on my phone evennow we’re still at like that sort ofurgent critical level for certain typesof PPE there was a week where it wasactually easier for me to get forprivate planes willing to go pick uprespirators from China than it was forme to find legitrespirators right you go down all ofthese rabbit holes that take hours daysto figure out and you’re still I meanyou know and they come back with nothingI was on the phone with three M’s GlobalRisk team yesterday describing one ofthe rabbit holes that I went under andthey were telling me look we don’t haveany supply we don’t have this wouldprobably be good for people to know theydon’t have they don’t sell in Europe soif someone’s telling you that they’relike they have a cache of 3m 1860’s inEurope they don’t have that they don’tsell in Europe because of the regulatorystuff if someone from like the the lotconformant conformance documents are allproperly fake you know just I think onthe one hand you’re seeing the best inpeople and then on the other hand you’realso seeing the worst in people sothat’s what you’re seeing on the groundand I think it’s in some ways it’samazing because you know you know thatthe work that you’re doing which wasalways good which is always related tothe public good was making a differencebut now it’s potentially really savinglives on a daily basis so that’s reallygreat but that’s also like kind ofstressful for people and so if you can’tget something it’s really tragic andthen you’re feeling very desperate allthe time right and so I know somejurisdictions have been prepayingor you know doing the deposits or doingescrows as necessary we have not donethat because I’ve been we’ve been luckywe haven’t had to do that but also Ithink dan from New York came up withthis term but this gray market sourcingyou guys we just all have to be verycareful about it and so I’ll stop therebecause I think that gives you a littlebit of flavor of what we’re dealing withyeah and it’s true and it’s just aflavor what we’re dealing with and Ithink we’re going to talk more aboutsome of those challenges that youhighlighted for us as we continue thisconversationso speaking of challengesBantam I know that you have a backgroundand thinking about transparency andcommunity and engagement and these areboth certainly crucial factors right nowas you respond to this crisis butunfortunately transparency and communityengagementalso some of the first approaches thatgovernments can drop it at these times Ilove to hear about what you see is someof the main challenges right nowespecially in regards to these factorsyeah definitely so I think you knowtransparency in public access during atime of crisis is important andnecessary you know for the clarity intolike government decision-makingprocesses and it gives you know thepublic better reassurance about what thegovernment is doing right but it’s easyto drop like you mentioned right so wemust find flexible ways and resilientways to you know engage a residents in ameaningful conversation beyond just thecurrent crisis right is to give themaccess so the number one challenge rightis that all the the efforts that makeour cities thrive right such as townhalls public involvement efforts thatinclude large gatherings of crowds todaymake our cities vulnerable right tospread in the virus so how do we respondto that that’s the question right and sowe’re seeing how technology can help ussuch as having this panel virtuallyright but at the same time in thetechnology industry which I operate incan only adapt as fast as the city isopen to welcoming those types ofservices right through procurement orthrough you know direct allocation ofbudgets from a department or let’s saycity councilman’s office but the ideahere is that if citizens you know arebeing asked to stay at home and you knowfollow these ordinances which isimportant so that we can you know canfight the virus you know the citizensshould also demand from you know theirpublic officials more transparency inthe form of getting them involved in thepublic policy process and that could beby you know informing the public aboutyou know these meetings are taking placeon a daily basis or weekly basis and toproviding these available technologiesto maximize the real-time publicengagement but then you run into theissue of a digital divide right whereyou have a lot of folks in communitiesthat don’t even have access to internetright so it’s it’s a it’s a complexenvironment to operate in right whentalking about engaging the public duringa time of crisis in my case for examplewe launched a cove in nineteen supporttool that it’s a self screening tool aprice gouging and large gathering modulereporting to that is free for the publicwhy did we do that we were trying tofind a way to go through procurement butwe found that small startups dealingwith technology trying to help citieswe’re gonna have an uphill battle rightwhen introducing this type of tools orenvironments to cities and so we decidedto go ahead and give it out for free andthe response has been great it has alsohelped us you know establishrelationships with city governments thatbefore we had never talked to right andthe idea here is to also incentivizethose small and medium sized cities thatmaybe do not have access to you knowlarge technology platforms or Suitesfrom you know Oracle Motorola and so onright so as a start-up we understandthat smaller organizations such as smallcities and medium-sized cities run intoa lot of trouble right when trying topurchase this type of item so ourresponse was let’s give it out for youright and so the way we’re deploying itright is through advertisement indifferent cities in Texas and they usehas skyrocketed then what happens isthat we send emails to the governmentsabout the the use of the service and nowthey can access that the dashboard rightthat the product itself so we’ve seenhow like different methods can beapplied to this crisis when dealingright with procurement or being astart-up trying to work with governmentbut the reality is that it’s not easy isnot easy and I think you know we’regonna see more of how startups in thetechnology space working with citygovernments will find creative ways toto continue that relationship becausethings have become a little bit stagnantlike you mentioned earlier today inregards to the challenges that we’refacing with simple products such as facemask and otherof products will now imagine that thelayer of technology which is morecomplex it’s more difficult to make agovernment welcomed a technologycomponent you know without procurementor in an efficient and timely manner andthen even more you know the idea ofwhere do you find a budget when in thetime of crisis budget is of the essenceso those are some of the variables andchallenges that we face and how weovercame this challenge of working withcity government during a time of crisisthank you yeah one thing that we’ve alsoobserved at Fed OCP is just that a lotof the challenges that were already inplace are just magnified right now inthis crisis situation and someone whocan speak well to what’s happeningacross the country right now it’s Gregso Greg it does seem to be the HungerGames out there when it comes tosecuring some of the materials that weneed and everyone seems to be competingwith everyone so I’d love to get yourtake on what policy and coordinationchallenges you’ve seen and also whatstrategies you’ve seen that can help uslead to better results Thanks so yessimilar to the Hunger Games Icharacterized the current state ofprocurement and government is somethingbetween frantic and highly adaptive sortof the twin polls and we kind of heardthat from our speakers from the citiesas well today in our view you knowgovernments are having to buy thingsthey never bought before they buy themfaster than they’ve ever bought anythingbefore sometimes they’re trying toextend and repurpose existing contractsmake a decision about what’s anemergency and what’s not an emergency areal emergency and do all this whilewe’re working from home dealing withbudget shortfalls and still maintainingethics and transparency to BeddoesCommons the GPL has heard a lot recentlyabout states competing with each otherin sourcing ppl PPE but there’s actuallya lot of cooperation going on that wesee mainly at a regional level citiesand states are frequently in touch witheach other and with nationalorganizations like the nigp the NationalInstitute for governmental procurementand there were cities partners includingresults for Americasunlight foundation or ourselves just toshare tips and get ideas some of thethings we’re seeing happening right nowwe expect will end once we’re out ofthis and other things we certainly hopewill continue so we hope there’s someactually good things to pull out of thisin the endin terms of those things that expectwill end there’s been a move away fromcompetitive bidding for essential goodsand services to Michael’s point somesome of the sourcing that’s happeningjust trying to find stuff and not reallyworrying about the price or the sourceand trying to establish the service isthe legitimate or genuine source so forexample some action to deal with thisthe governor Connecticut Ned Lamontrecently exec issued an executive orderallowing for a waiver of competitivebidding in emergency situations only thecompetitive bid requirement is probablythe single most time-consuming processin procurement so it probably makessense to suspend that when you have animmediate need for PPE and their AOrestricts the waiver to Kogan relatedpurchases and they will go back tocompetitive bidding once Kogut is overso on to sort of those examples ofadjustments the government’s are makingto procurement practice that we hopewill continue one is the adjustment towork from home both for staff and forvendors procurement processes have beenheavily paper-based in many places andface to face going into the pandemic andgovernments have now been forced to moveto things like online vendor conferencesand online proposal submission no longerdo you have to drop off ten hard copiesof your proposal into a marked box andhave them you know tabbed andspiral-boundthat’s that will no longer be the caseNew Orleans had a requirement that thereare FP evaluation committee would meetto do evaluation scoring in an openpublic meeting which is great fortransparency I’d never actually seenthis anywhere else but it’s not so goodfor social distancing so a few weeks agoNew Orleans held their first onlineevaluation committee meeting in publicbut online and it went well so they’llbe doing this this way for theforeseeable futurethese kind of adaptations that get ridof outdated cumbersome practices we hopewill live on and the good permanentimprovements the procurement processand we see as repurposing of existingcontracts to adapt to the currentsituation another example from NewOrleans is the one-stop WorkforceServices vendor is now helping peoplewho are out of work to fill outapplications for unemployment insuranceand help them navigate the system and inDetroit we work with an office therethat formerly did lower income homerenovation projects they completelyshifted their efforts to help peopleapply for programs to be able to stay intheir homes so we’re seeing this kind offlexibility and adaptability happeningin many of the places we work and ittells me that in the future that statelocal governments will want to thinkmore broadly about the needs of thepeople they serve and work with vendorsand providers to figure out how to meetthose needs with more flexible andadaptable contracts our work at thegovernment performance lab generallytries to get governments to determinewhat results they want to achieve withcontracts and then design performancemeasures and senses to drive towardsthose results so we want to helpgovernments move away from just fundingactivities and toward funding outcomesand it turns out that what they’re doingin response to the crisis is actuallymoving them in this directionthey’re learning more about themarketplace some things that we neverthought we’d have to learn but certainlymoving in that direction they’recollaborating more with their serviceproviders to adapt contracts to newreality and they’re ready I think totake the next step of developingcontracts that reward innovation andresults and we’re happy to help themwith that stuff great thank you Gregalso thinking about solutions I’d loveto hear from you Marielle about the workthat you do with collaborativepurchasing and what other approachesyou’ve seen work well in this time yeahthanks so um Cobra cure helps localgovernments generally save time andtaxpayer dollars by sharing contractsand we serve a few hundred governmentsacross the United States so when westarted getting requests for help fromlocal governments looking for PPE westarted with what we knew which wascooperative contracts so as Craigmentioned like during non-emergencysituations governments typically have tobuy off of contracts creating createdexcuse me througha formal competitive bidding process andas an alternative to running a newcompetitive bidding process whichtypically takes like 4 to 24 monthsgovernments can buy from suppliers thatare already on contracts through thatother governments have created so byusing a shareable or cooperativecontract government buyers can can savetime and oftentimes also achieve costsavings through aggregated purchasingpower so our core product is a free toolthat helps governments find and buy fromthose suppliers available on cooperativecontract and we responded initially tothe PPE crisis by putting a list ofsuppliers together that were availableto sell those items that we were seeinggovernment’s needed to purchase throughexisting contracts the interesting thingwas that we realized that the problemthat we were solving for was no longercompliance so because it’s an emergencysituation the requirement to buy off ofcompetitively bid contracts has beenwaived for most agencies what werealized is that we were actuallysolving for this problem of trust assome of the other panelists havementioned especially in this momentwhich has been described as the WildWest of purchasing we are seeingextremely elevated levels of pricegouging competition counterfeit productsand fraud it’s a very chaotic situationand so it’s not surprising thatgovernment’s want to purchase fromsuppliers that other governments havealready purchased from because theytrust these suppliers more they’ve beenthrough a diligence process they’ve soldother government customers they havemore of a reputation because they’vebeen established for a long amount oftime so our initial response again ather procure was to help government sharethose suppliers that were alreadyavailable on contract but we also veryquickly experienced like this need is sogreat and many of those existingsuppliers quickly ran out of availableinventory many of them are starting tocome back online but there was a periodof a few weeks at least where the knownsuppliers that were available andtrusted had nothing or were unsure aboutwhen they would have inventory again andso we we really felt a need to supportlocal governments that we serve bystarting a source and diligence newsuppliers and so we very quickly learnedof course that actually sourcing newsuppliers isn’t hard sourcing real andnot fraudulent suppliers in other wordsdoing the diligence on the suppliers isthe really hard part and that’s becausethere’s limited time to conduct apotentially really complicated processthat in again normal times would requireboots on the ground seeing you know themanufacturers and the factories and soat on the one hand you know you have areally urgent need you have to movequickly if you want to get access toavailable inventory but on the otherhand like you’re being asked to purchasesomething that is inherently extremelyriskyso actually collaboration we foundbecomes really important here too andwhat I mean by that is not collaboratingto work together to create contracts butcollaborating together to to build trustand do that diligence process faster sowe’ve seen that local governments havebeen sharing the suppliers that they’reworking with so that other governmentscan fast-track their diligence andvetting process and what we’ve the rolethat we’ve played during this time onCobra cure is essentially helping tocollect and record those purchasingexperiences and then elevate newsuppliers that have successfully servedlocal governments before and have averified buyer reference to a listessentially of more vetted and trustedsuppliers you know I think it’s clearthat we need more collaboration we needto be buying together not just at thelocal government level but at thefederal level to compete on this Googlemarket for masks and other items andunfortunately in the absence of acoordinated federal response we’ve youknow we’ve seen some collaborationactivity like States you know Californiafor instance stepping up to purchasematerials and even sending some of thosematerials to other states and we haveseen some regional organizations likeone of our partners in the Kansas Citymetro area the mid-america RegionalCouncil leading regional efforts tosource PPE and aggregating thesepotentially smaller orders that wouldn’totherwise be able to get outto legit PPE supply together socollaboration is happening andpurchasing but not enough and once againat the local government level I thinkwe’ve seen coordination collaborationinvolving working together on diligenceand helping peer agencies navigate theWild West of of PPE purchasing and Ithink overall we’ve been reallyencouraged by how many local agencieshave provided feedback about suppliersto enable governments other governmentsto progress faster and with a higherlevel of trust during this this time ofneedgreat thank you Marielle sky so youstarted in your introduction to talk tous about some of the challenges that oursmall and medium businesses have had andwe’d love to hear more about what theseSMEs can do and what local governmentscan do to help make it through thiscrisis since they have been so hard hitand will be so important as part of ourrecovery efforts yes thank youdefinitely very important to help smallbusinesses now more than ever so firstand foremost I want to say that I reallysympathize with our government agencyprocurement professionals right now Iknow it is not easy the things thatMichael and Jennifer have sharedwe’ve been talking to lots ofprocurement some executives are allacross the country both on the privateand in public sector and it is a hardtime especially when you’re in theimmediate crisis situation right and andMichael and I have talked about thisseveral times before but if I want totake a step back for a second becauseyes technology can help I think what weneed is a shift in mentality thementality of government procurement andbado mentioned this as well governmentprocurement has always been historicallya very offline very in-person processthat’s really designed more for largecompanies it is that no one ever accusedsi P or Oracle on being a user-friendlysystem but those are the systems thatare most often used and right now weneed innovation we need a new way ofthinking we need to come together asMary was mentioning to be able to dothis in a centralized effort and that’snot how the system is instead of rightnow I’m really hoping that now thatwe’re starting hopefully starting tomove out of that immediate panicsituation into how do we think aboutmaking changes for the long term to helpbenefit things we can we can reallyassess the fact that we need morecentralized systems across the board andwe need to make things easier I knowthat the tendency is to go after peopleto go after suppliersyou have worked with for a long timebefore but we’ve talked about this onthis call you can’t always use the samepeople over and over again and by theway most of those home suppliers are notminority and women-owned businessesbecause it’s traditionally very hard forthem people who are getting hardest inthis in this Kovach crisis areminorities both from the healthperspective and from a financialperspective yet there there’s a ton ofinnovation that’s happening in thisspaceand we know several small businesseseven in the LA area who have said wewant to help we can repurpose oursystems to be able to make things thatpeople need right now to be able to makePPE and supply those but where do we gowho do we go to so on the one hand whilethe the traditional mentality is let’smake this easier so let’s create anotherwebsite for people to go to that is justa little bit 19 related in focus and canbypass some of these long lengthyprocesses it actually can exacerbate theproblem because if you have every agencythen already having their traditional nowebsites and paths and then on top ofthat now we have these new Comid-nineteen different websites andpaths and there’s no coordination amongthem it’s mass confusion and mass chaosand me the impetus is on moving quicklybecause small businesses are dying outby the hundreds and thousands right nowwe’ve been beating this drum for thepast three and a half years but it hasnever been more evident than it is rightnow that small businesses are thebackbone of this economy make up half ofall employment and we’re seeing thisright now I know we’re talking aboutlocal local governments but I have toshare this out with you because it wasjust so mind-boggling for me that theSBA received over 44 million loanapplications from small businesses thereare 30 point 2 million small businessesin the United States ok so when I talkto them I said well how do we have thiswell what’s the issue and they said wellnumber one the biggest issue is thatthere is when you apply for a loanthrough the SBA you don’t receive anemail saying that your application wasreceived so first and foremost peopledon’t even know if their application canreceive so now they’re just we havein multiple places right but butsecondly no one knows there’s nocommunication there’s no transparency asvidoes mentioning and no status updatesor anything so you don’t know if whereyou are in the queue if they’re gonnaget to you money is running out etc somillions of small businesses will notmake it and though it is really hardand people are pulling back on theirprocurement budgets we have to find away to work with more small and minorityand women-owned businesses because thisis the crux of the economy and I thinkit’s the best way to do that is tocentralize efforts and make the processeasier for everyoneperiod and that’s really what we’ve doneand what we focus on and a bazaar isjust a centralized procurement andsourcing process where you have thatlinked in for the supply chain so youhave that centralized aggregated oneplace to find and vet suppliers and thenhave your procurement your RFP processand an RFP process I think I hope we aredone with the days of 375 page partiesright can I just put it out there rightnow like that needs to end because we’veseen that we can get things done so muchfast they’re so much more efficient ifwe don’t have that in the vetting youknow we’ve heard people say well if youdon’t have those long RFPs you know wecan’t get through the vetting processthese are two different things these aretwo different things one thing is whatis the need let’s focus on the need andhave needs-based procurements and agileprocurement methodology and the othercomponent is betting so while there’sthere are some things that smallbusinesses can do I’m to better fromyour familiarize themselves withdifferent processes I really think thethe biggest thing that will help is tobe able to centralized governmentsystems a habbit coordinated to make ituser-friendly and just to make it easierso that we can get through procurementand it doesn’t take ya six months to ayear for every procurement processthat’s astrong strong message to end on andbefore we go to our open conversation Ihave one final question for ourpanelists and that’s if you could answerin one sentence as we emerge from thesereally challenging times what are thelessons that you hope that the people onthis call will take away from ourcurrent experience to improve ourrecovery efforts as you move ahead andwe can start with NATO governments tendto be reactive not proactive these timeshave really changed the way thatgovernments are adapting to differenttrends and with that I think comes thisresponsibility right from the privatesector or small businesses or startupsto support governments in this trial youknow in their period and the way thatlooks like is by you know launchinginitiatives or pilots that can supportgovernments in addressing and you knowfighting this type of viruses like Ovidbecause I think you know as we see onthe news and we read more of these thesecrisis may become prolonged and we mayhave waves of these virus right so thequestion is as government will continueto adapt what is the private sector whatare small businesses and startups goingto do to support these governments inthe next wave or situations where we’regonna find challenges regards to healthgreat thank you and JenniferyouI guess if I’m limited to one sentientaspiration I think Michael Oh may agreeI think digital procurement is just morecritical than ever I mean it touchesupon when everybody said if you have acentralized I think sky was talkingabout centralized I was taking notes asfolks were talking this guy’s talkingabout centralized Greg’s talking abouteliminating paper and duplicativepractices thanos talking abouttransparency Mariel is talking aboutsourcing if you have a digitalend-to-end system that is managing thewhole process that is providingtransparency for all that’s collectingdata and information how critical isdata and information to responding tothis crisis knowing who’s on thefrontlines knowing who their clients areknowing how many people are being servedknowing where to get your PPE I mean allof that is data that could be stored ina central system and utilized inemergencies like this so I think the onetakeaway is cities need to really getmoving on digital procurement and as Imentioned before Michael and Dan Simonat mocs were really leaders in thisspace certainly for the city of New Yorkwhich is you know one of the largest Ithink we are the largest in the in thecountry in really moving to a digitalplatform to touch all of these goalsthat are all critical in an emergencysituation and also in an everydaysituation great thank you and sky whatare your thoughts while it is criticalto go digital and have digital systems Idon’t think it’s enough I think it hasto be digital user-friendly systems thatmake it easier for both participants touse I mean the amount of times that Ihave edge I personally educated thegovernment of procurement staff on theirown government procurement processes tobe able to accomplish their goals is usdownso yes digitization user-friendly andcentralization is extremely importantand everyone needs to be focused on howdo we do that prevent to prevent thisfrom happening again thank youand Michael yes I would just echo whateveryone else said the one thing that Iwould add is I think in a situation likethis shows you what we are capable of ifwe have to act quickly that I think wehave to be critical about just becausewe can act quickly doesn’t mean that weshould get rid of all of the controlsthat we have in place or the vettingthat we have in place that we need to dobut as you scale up and and go digitalyou should also think about just whatkind of what processes don’t need toexist right because you have that levelof transparency on that level processand you know I think transparencyvisibility all of that is good but italso doesn’t work if you don’t have thetalent and the people who are able andwilling to to actually implement andmake it work and I think that’s that’s afar bigger challenge for all of us thatwe have to invest in thank you Marioyeah I mean I think we do have an havealways had really big common challengesand we tend to handle them at the localgovernment level in a fairly fragmentedway and so we really do need to buildprocurement collaboration muscles forfaster and more effective and inclusiverecovery and I think a lot of that goesback to you know open free availabledata for governments to be able to shareon board suppliers including smallbusinesses when are your own and womenand businesses and essentially like notrepeat and reinvent the wheel everysingle time but to elevate up and bubbleup the things that are working and thegood work that is being done becauseit’s legally possible to share it andthe technology exists it just has notbeen applied in in this domain as muchas it could be so I think thiscollaboration infrastructure and it’ssomething we’re working to build ATCOprocure will be even more essentialduring the recovery than ever beforethank you and Greg you the final wordthanks Kay so I think this is somethingthat Jennifer touched on but werecognized more than ever I thinkthrough this experience that weco-create government services withprivate and nonprofit sectors and so wego back to our lessons learned generallyunderstand the marketplace and engagewith providers collaborate with serviceproviders in an equitable way andshaping what your what your purchasingand develop contracts that rewardinnovation and results great thank youso we’d hoped to reserve some time forall of you here on the call tocontribute your thoughts and your ideasand your questions I am glad to see thatmany of you have already been having alively chat but now is your moment toadd your voices as wellso if you would like to say somethingplease leave a message in the chat OhRory would you like to unmute yourselfan industrial question directly to folksyouhi my name is Jerry McDonald I work withthe University of Oxford’s governmentoutcomes lab we are thinking about howsocial services are changing and how thesocial services and outcomes aroundsocial services need to exchange andadjust and flex but I have a questionthat is more directly related to what Iheardjust now and the question related youknow is are you capturing and sharinginformation about a performance andquality it strikes me is relatively easyto share information about the entityname contract award or price is paid butyou’ve all talked about the importanceof trust how do you digitize trust yeahI can I can start with that so with abetter platform with avasara we have ashared collaborative infrastructure thatallows everyone on meeting multiplegovernment agencies and jurisdictions toshare access to one network of vendorswhich is a centralized ever-growingnetwork and each agency can includetheir own notes about that that vendorand their experiences with that vendorand which we wanted to share acrossagencies the difference is the issue isthat legally a lot of different agenciesare not allowed to share thatinformation with each otherand sometimes not even within otherdepartments within the same organizationso that has been a challenge andcontinues to be a challenge it issomething that we are actively workingon but that’s that’s one of the bigreasons why it hasn’t just existedeverywhere right now because becauselegally you can’t do that and that issuch a great question if anyone from thepanel or others on the call would liketo contribute feel free to unmuteyourselves and and let us know yourthoughts yeah I would just say this is ahuge thing that’s missing in procurementin general is like we spend so much timeand effort getting through thecontracting process and then and I’msure Greg can share a ton more but it’slike and then what happens you know wehad a contractthat existed we had a supplier that didsome work but what were the results whatwere the outcomes that part is so oftenunfortunately missing from the contractmanagement you know process and cycleand it typically you know to myknowledge and in my experience it isn’tcollected in a very standardized processor shared publicly and asked I mentionedthere are some challenges around how doyou design that work and how do youshare it from a legal perspective it’sbeen fascinating I think by necessitykoper curious found ourselves likeasking for feedback basically just in amore binary right around like is thesupplier real and did the stuff that youordered arrived like on time did it meetyour quality expectations etc so it’s avery it’s a very simple rubric for nowand it’s simpler obviously to whenyou’re talking about like commodities orit’s like did it show up was the productlegit it’s much harder and morecomplicated and again I’m sure Gregg hasa lot of experience here but to evaluateservices in part because the way we askor have asked for things occasionally ingovernment as well doesn’t always set upthe relationship for success so it’stricky and it’s really needed and I hopeyou know we have as we think aboutthings that we’re taking in to this kindof new normal that we’re establishingyou know that’s one of the things Ithink I’m excited about where we aregetting more feedback from from buyersand seeing governments sharing thatexperience more and more again just oncommodities for now but we’ll see howthat changes ingress I’m sorry I justwanted up services I’m and Brian andMuriel I’d say this applies to socialservices but equally to technologyservices and capital projects those kindof things we go so far as to say that inyour RFP and this helps with thelegality of it you should indicate thatif you’re as successful and win thecontract under that we’re going to doregular performance checks and thatinformation could be used in makingfuture procurement decisions within amunicipality or that state but wehaven’t gone so far as to say that thatdata which is going to be kind of uniqueto that city or state could be sharedwith otherand I think that the consistency of itthere’s there’s a lot of issues with youknow the you know whether thatsubjective data or subject to data andbut we put it up front than the RFP sothat at least we feel generally as alegal basis for collecting it and usingit focusing government Oh Jennifer I wasjust in the city of New York performanceevaluations are part of the standardpractice contract management I there’scertainly room for improvement but as abasic activity it’s required for all ofour human service contracts and then youknow for goods you have other ways ofevaluating etc but for our servicesperformance evaluations are part of theregular practice they’re also actuallydigitized through our passport platformthey’re actually managed in passportthey’re available for other agencies tolook at when they’re makingdeterminations around a vendorsresponsibility level of responsibilityfor an award and a contract so we haveit centralized and there’s alsoopportunities in our legislation andregulations for general access toperformance evaluation so on the verysort of basic level we have it we’reusing it and thinking about how we canmake them stronger as well hi my name isJudy save you and I’m actually callingfrom Bermuda but I’m on the board ofsomething called a vision spring andsome of you may be familiar with it it’swon a lot of awards they normallyprovide eyeglasses to the basically tothe developing world to the masses forthe first time ever we’re looking atrepurposing our contacts in producingeyewear to making goggles face masksprotective shields etc and focusing onthe US market for the first time so theone of the reasons I’m gonna ask themkronfeld one of the reasons I was veryinterested in this call was to figureout we don’t really have a system foroffering what we normally offer toplaces like India or Ghana for the USthe particular urban us when we see allthese obvious problems so one of thethings I wanted to ask is how would anorganization likebring the does six million dollars worthof work a year how might it access orfind out where is the greatest need forthings like the PPE that we can accessfrom our various sources so it gets tothe the most underserved places ataffordable prices so we’re we haveproducts we want to get it to the rightplaces and find an efficient way ofdoing that helping the neediest first atan affordable price any ideas of how toefficiently do that quickly thank youthe city of New York has a centralizedsourcing webpage so I can I can sendthat along here the link to that butMoxa’s worked with the city to set up aspace for folks and businesses likeyourself to be able to submitinformation about goods and servicesthat are available for the köppen reliefso I can send that to everybody on thechat box Jennifer does that mean doesthat say any and the county and theTransit Authority and the othersurrounding agencies I’m sorry what’syour questiondoes that say if you’re mentioning isthat encompass the county and theTransit Authority and the other agencieswithin the the greater area it’s for thecity of New York and if you’re familiarwith the city of New York we have likeour mayoral agencies and then we havethe agencies that are like hybrids likenature’s like that do we is like thatI’m not sure I my instinct is that it’scovering all of those agencies as wellbut don’t don’t quote me on that butcertainly you’re gonna be covering atleast the 40 mayoral and it’s going intoa centralized hub that is then you knowtaking the next steps with those leavesand where where the need is the greatestand and figuring out how to move productand services along so mythe neural response would be go ifyou’re interested in making yourselfknown just submit and then you know takeit from there and see where that goesgreat and those of you who have otherthoughts feel free to follow up directlywith students she’s put her contactinformation there I know that Dustin hada question and I think it’sunfortunately we were running out oftime I think this is a good one for usto end on yeah and I’ll and the topicmay lead to another panel or some suchso so I’m just linear I’m a formerprocurement officer and we work withprocurement shops around the countrywe’re currently doing new normal designexercises with several public entitiesincluding a major city and the theconcept on that is that we’re not goingback to where we were because there’s noback right where we are in the responseis going to continue and so there’sthings about the procurementorganization that we’ve put on holdwhile we’re dealing with this there’sgoing to still need to be really in putso I’m curious from the entities thatare doing the government side like theNew York and the LA like how are youboth dealing with the current and thenplanning to bring everything else thatyou’ve been doing that you’ve beenhaving to put on hold so that doesn’tbecome the next crisis has that beenpart of your thought process and how areyou how are you trying to address thatMichael you want to go first or sureso yeah the so the county we have somelevel of technical functionality toprovide for online sourcing onlinecontract management online digitalsignatures it’s not I mean frankly it’snot coherent and it’s not built in a waythat allows for easy reporting and it’snot in a place where I want it and sothat was part of my goal I’ve only beenhere for about a year and so part ofthis past year was socializing everyoneand also developing a strategic plan forour next three years which included atransformation a digitalas well as a process one that obviouslytakes resources and it’s unclear rightnow whether or not I’m gonna have theresources to be able to do that so wemight just have to use some belts insuspenders approach in the near termwhile we you know while we figure outwhat our path going forward it’s gonnabe that’s that’s really the the sort ofhigh level answer I do want to stress soyou know when you talk about procurementand we we’ve we touched on this a littlebit is we I think focus a lot on thesourcing right on the competitiveelements and or finding the vendor andgoing to an RFP process we I think GPLdoes a really great job of focusing onthe other important elements likecontract management which I thinkfrankly will be a lot harder to do inthe new normal if we’re not gonna beable to go send people or people don’tfeel comfortable going out into thefield if we have to socially distance ifwe you know there’s a lot of stuff thatI think that as we’ve as we thinkthrough what the 18 what the next 18 to24 months is gonna be like it it’s veryclosely connected to how we as a countryin the world are gonna respond to thisglobal pandemic right it’s not somethingthat even we’re not guaranteed a vaccineso how are we gonna actually keep try tokeep things at this at this at leastworkable level and if it’s gonna haveworkforce implications its that willthat will sort of flow down to where weare today right and so I think that’sgoing to be really challenging for usyeah so how do we maintain I think yourquestion is how do you maintain theregular work while you’re responding toa crisis situation we machs we have theresources we began building a digitalsystem a couple years ago so we have theresources in place we have a quite a bigteam now in place and sooh we’re able to you know in positionourselves internally to new sorts ofteams that work on responding every dayevery hour to the twists and turns ofkovin 19 while still ensuring that wehave folks around and available to keepbuilding out digital procurement we’regoing live with a third major release ofour platform in the next couple ofmonths and that will bring allsignatures online and remove notaries asMichael had mentioned it’s just so muchmore than just the store saying it’sgonna take the whole process from endand online so we continue to build we’recreating new ways of testing we used tobring vendors and agencies into mocks toactually get into the system and try tobreak it we can’t do that now it’s anit’s much more complicated to just sharescreens when you’re in a testingenvironment so thinking of new ways todo that but yeah moving forward becauseas we can see now more than evertransformation to our procurementpractice is essential so we have to keepour eyes on on that road thank you somuch and I can’t imagine better wordsfor us to end onso with that over to Jennifer forclosing commentsyeah um first of all I’m just delightedum how many folks have remained on thecall particularly Michael and Jenniferthank you so much for taking this timeto share your resources and also Michaelparticularly giving us insight about thestresses that you’re under I just wantto honor what all of you are goingthrough and all of you who are on thecall who are doing this frontlineday-to-day procurement this you knowpeople laugh about oh procurement godthat’s so boring it’s essential it’slife-saving right this is a big part ofwhat government does and so it’s reallykind of an honor to be able to spotlightand support that work particularly nowI’m a couple things that Ireally struck me on the call is thisnotion of solving for trust as we goforward what are the new ways that we’regoing to use to solve for trust if youlook at the development of procurementsystems previously the way we solved fortrust was a lot of rules and a lot oflawyers I’m trained as a lawyer I cansay stuff like that are there new fastermore flexible more accessible moreinclusive ways to solve for trusts howdo we how do we solve that problem usingnew technology tools and this also thisnotion of a shift in mentality if we cancreate faster and more flexibleprocesses imperfect ones but faster moreflexible processes for equipment that’sliterally life and death presumablythere is a little bit more flexibilityand experimentation in the system forsome of the run-of-the-mill supplies andservices that governments do so I thinkthis can open up the thinking andperhaps give city and state and countyleaders right the county executives themayor’s really a powerful impetus tomake procurement change andaccessibility more visible and perhaps apriority in for their administration andwe have all of these entities who youknow have been on the call who are partof OCP who are in the Aspen Network whocan help so I really look forward tothinking about what we can do togetherthrough this crisis and then as we startto rebuild what a procurement systemmight look like again that can be fasteffective efficient and equitable sothat the people who are supplying ourcities are as diverse and wonderful andamazing as the people who are living inand leading our cities so thanks so muchfor your time and thoughts for today
Never before has it been more important for our local governments to get public procurement right. How our local governments respond to the current crisis will lay the foundation for more equitable communities in the recovery to come.
Procurement is part of three connected, existential challenges for cities. First, trusted suppliers of emergency medical procurement have run out stock, leaving government officials unsure where to turn in urgent situations. Municipal governments are facing vendor price gouging, counterfeit products, and fraud. “There was a week where it was actually easier for me to get four private planes willing to go pick up respirators from China than it was for me to find legitimate respirators,” Owh said in a recent videocall on local government procurement during the pandemic.
The changes that local governments are making to get life-and-death supplies at unprecedented speeds from new vendors could help city officials address the second and third challenges. The second challenge is the collapse of county and municipal budgets because of extraordinary outlays and because of the free fall in tax receipts and other streams of income (parking revenue, for example) as business owners shut their doors and furlough their workers during this period of sheltering in place. Local government budgets won’t rebound for a very long time, so officials will have less money to spend on goods and services for the foreseeable future. They’ll need to get more for their money with every purchase.
The third challenge is that businesses owned by women and people of color are particularly vulnerable to economic shocks. As has been well-documented, small businesses that already struggled to access capital and didn’t have strong relationships with lenders have been largely shut out of federal relief funds. As Sky Kelley, Founder and CEO of Avisare noted, “The people getting hit the hardest in this crisis are minorities both from a health perspective and economic perspective. We have to find a way to work with small minority- and women-owned businesses because they are the crux of the economy.”
welcome to everyone my name is Kay I amfrom open contracting partnership andfor those of you who are less familiarwith open contracting partnership we area nonprofit that works in the UnitedStates and abroad to make publiccontracting more efficient open anddeliver better results for everyone wework with governments civil society andthe private sector and as we’ve beensupporting our partners over these lastfew weeks on emergency procurement we’velearned just how important the role ofopen and efficient procurement is forhelping to manage this crisis and whenwe came together in Aspen it was soclear to us that there was an urgentneed for a space for a conversation withmembers from across the procurementecosystem about how we are respondingfor code to cope at 19 and every dayit’s more apparent that the fiscalimpact of coab at 19 is unprecedented inthese times we really must make the mostout of our limited public money that wehave to effectively fight the virusprotect our populations as well as veryimportantly to rebuild our economy weare very eager to hear from our amazingselection of panelists and all of youabout the challenges that you’reexperiencing and the practices that arehelping you to get better resultsespecially around open data transparencyand collaboration quick overview of ouragenda the first half of our call willbe a discussion with our chart ofpanelists and then we’re going to try tohold back at least 20 minutes for anopen conversation with all of you thisis not a webinar we really intend forthis to be an open space for us to havea conversation and collaborate we feelthat there are so many great people onthe call today and we want to make surethat we hear your voices and all thatyou have to share and contribute soquick ground rules we know that there’sa lot of people on the call today so weask that you follow our guidance to makesure that it’s a welcome and safe spacefor everyone we invite you to make agenerous use of the chat function andthe sidebars youget your comments in and questions wealso would love it if you wouldcontribute to the document which we’vebeen sharing around earlier with ournotes and and when the time comes to askour panelists questions I’ll be keepingtrack of who is asking what and duringthe open conversation I will be makingsure that I am met and we are callingpeople in the order that they volunteerwe also ask that you keep your commentsand questions brief given just how manypeople are in our call todaysavvy everyone has a chance and lastlyas as is our new reality since we’re onsoon please keep yourself on you if youare not talking now that all thathousekeeping is out of the wayI am honored to introduce you toJennifer Bradley the founding directorof the Aspen Institute for the Centerfor urban innovation who will set outthe framework context for the call todaythanks so much kay I really appreciatethe opportunity to be here I’m extremelygrateful to all of our panelists whohave made the time in this incrediblybusy and urgent period that we’re livingin to talk about the importance ofprocurement the Center for urbaninnovation works with leaders in citygovernment nonprofits philanthropies andthe private sector to make sure thatlocal innovation agendas are alignedwith inclusion and equity imperatives wewere drawn to procurement as a topicbecause procurement is essential to bothinnovation and equity and procurement isparticularly in the spotlight these daysand under great pressure as citygovernments are working very hard to getthe emergency equipment that we needwe’re so glad to work with OCT on thiscall to help folks understand whatresponses are working now to getessential supplies and servicesdelivered and we also want to understandwhere responses are falling short andhow to close the gap particularly onquestions of equity often I think theapproach that that many people have toequity is that it’s something that youcan do in good timebut in case of emergency it’s all aboutsort of efficiency and power purchasingbut particularly given that equityimplications of who’s being hit hardestby Kovac 19 both economically and in ahealth perspective we understand thatequity can’t wait equity has to be apart of everything so I’m particularlyinterested in hearing how governmentsare trying to make sure that theyfulfill their equity commitments duringthis emergency time and finally we wantto learn about what the emergency isteaching us that can guide how localgovernments buy services and suppliesduring the recovery and afterwards canthis crisis cede lessons for localgovernments and the larger ecosystem ofsmall business and procurement to bemore flexible more transparent morecollaborative and more equitable so I’mextremely excited for this discussiontoday and we’ll turn it back over to Kaygreat Thank You Jennifer now we reallydo have a terrific group of paneliststoday so I’m going to ask you tointroduce yourselves and let us knowwhat you have been doing to keep seeingduring these crazy times and let’s getstarted with you better hey everyone myname is Betty Medina I’m the CEO andco-founder at iris we buildcollaborative platforms to engage thepublic from we have the government toResidence what am i doing to stay sane Ibought this peloton before this crisisand it was the best purchase that I madeso far I’m writing that thing every dayso that’s keeping me sane wonderful andJennifer from New York City hi goodafternoon thanks for inviting the cityof New York happy to be here torepresent us I’m from the mayor’s officeof contract services and our officeoversees about 20 billion dollars worthof annual procurement that’s across 40city agencies we have a team of over6,000 procurement staff across the citywe have 15,000 vendors and slightly morethan that actually who are registered todo business with the cityso the scope of our work is quite broadand we are currently pursuing technologyinitiatives to digitize procurementacross the city of New Yorkwhile we are also supporting the city inour kovat relief response I amparticular oversee policy andpartnerships inside mosques and thatmeans that I’m working to cultivaterelationships with our vendorcommunities as Jennifer flagged equitybeing a particular interest we spend alot of time working with mwbes as wellas human service nonprofits which we’llget to I think in a little bit when westart talking about our response interms of what keeps me sane honestly thework is tremendous right now having thethe perspective that we have in the cityhaving a structure having so much to doevery day helps to keep me keep memotivated keep us motivated keep usmoving a glass of wine often helps and Iagree with beta that peloton especiallytheir new online apps are welcomedistraction great and Jennifer is Danjoining us today or not yeah I thinkit’s just nice to on the phonemmm all right so in that case it is overto Skye hi everyone Skye Kelley founderand CEO of a bazaar we are a procurementsourcing vendor registration and acertification platform all combined intoone like a LinkedIn for the supply chainwith a special emphasis on helping smallbusinesses I’m especially minority andwomen-owned businesses contract withgovernments at the local level and afederal you did this again as thatLinkedIn for the supply chain so what’skeeping me saying these days it’s hardto say saying it really is let me justput that out there I think one of thethings that’s helping is that we reallyyou are we are able to help our localgovernments able to go online anddigitized in a time and fashion and veryquickly when they need it most we areable to help small businesses which asall of you know small businesses arereally suffering right now especiallyminority and women-owned businesses theyare suffering the most and so being ableto provide that both that voice both atthe local level and assistance as wellas now at the federal level being ableto share the experiences of our smallbusinesses and advocate on behalf ofthem and make sure that we are movinginto this new era is really helpingoutside of that I don’t have a peloton Iactually hate exercise bikes it’s justit doesn’t work for me but I havestarted to do online workout classes inthe last couple of days I’m gonna behonest not before then so that is that’swhat’s helping that’s helping great andMichael Angelo’s here yes I’m here sorryI am sorry I’ve been a little bit crazythis morning so am I just supposed tointroduce myself just enjoy yourself yepkeep going and then I’m such a zoomNewby I’m terrible at this sorry my nameis Michael oh I’m the purchasing agentand general manager for the internalservices department for the County ofLos Angeles I have only been with thecounty for about a year I am NOT sayingright now so I’m not doing anything tokeep myself saying and very happy to beinteracting with OCP and Jennifer who isthe best facilitator I’ve ever seen inaction sky a good friend and all of youand Jennifer who I love who I hired andone day will hire me and thank you forinviting me well that’s it that’s anintrowe are also very excited to have all ofyou with us really is it a wonderfulpanel and our next terrific panelist isMario everyone I’m Mario Reed I’m aformer public servant and co-founder ofcopra care we’re a mission drivenstartup that supports more transparentefficient and inclusive publicprocurement especially focused at thelocal level and we do that by helpinglocal governments find and sharecontracts across the country yeah Ithink everyone sanity has become arelative thing I agree with the winehappening oftentimes a little bitearlier in the evening but yeah myhusband and I got a puppy back inJanuary which feels like years ago andhe’s been a huge source of entertainmentfor us those and a good excuse also toget outside for some socially distancefresh air and exercise he’s also madesome guest appearances on our zoom teammeetings on Cobra cure so he’soccasionally chimes in there as wellhe’s welcome to contribute to thismeeting as well if that happens Gregyou’re the last one hi I’m Greg wass andwith the government performance lab atthe Harvard Kennedy School the GPLconducts research and provides technicalassistance to state and localgovernments and how they can improve theresults that they achieve for theirconstituents particularly throughcontracting I want to shout out to OscarHernandez who’s in the audience herefrom OCP for inviting me to join today’spanel thanks Oscar good to see you andlet’s see to stay sane I guess I’dbecome a bit of a farmer we’ve beengrowing our own sprouts and we kind of asprout starter and we just planted somedill outside got some good weather it’svery cool so we do miss people but we’recommuning with our plants here that’sgreat so now that we’ve talked about allthe things that are keeping us sane I’mafraid we’re gonna have to go back intothe craziness that is our currentreality and I think that no one isbetter prepared to speak about just thechallengeand the real craziness of these timesthen Jennifer is based in New York Cityso Jennifer my first question is for youwe would really love to hear about youron the ground perspective I’m sure thatwe could talk a whole hour about thisreallybut yeah we’re just working on andseeing in New York City yeah for sureum I guess there’s a few ways ofthinking about it there’s the nuts andbolts challenges in the weeds technicalpieces such as sourcing PPE I mean we’reall familiar with the hourly newsbroadcasts around our blog howeveryou’re catching your information aroundthe struggles with sourcing ventilatorstesting now so across the board that’sbeen challenging we experienced it evenin the most sort of basic way and justtrying to get masks and gloves justacross the the world really folks arestretched on trying to get thoseresources so you have some of thattechnical challenges that you’re seeingevery day on the ground and trying to becreative and trying to move quicklybecause lives literally depends on itand then there are some sort of biggerstructural challenges that are changingand surfacing every day one is theeconomic financial challenges that we’refacing there’s a loss in tax revenuethere’s high unemployment how do youdetermine which services to maintainwhich services to modify which ones needto be cut in the city of New York asit’s true for many of the cities acrossthe country human services are deliveredby nonprofits but they’re essentially abranch of the government and so how doyou ensure that you maintain thoseservices you maintain thoseorganizations they’re important now andthey’re going to be important when weget through this period of time andmoving forward so how do you think aboutthat given the economic climate and theother piece that is sort of a challengeand one that we’re trying we always tryto grapple with and we’re coming up withnew ways of addressing it here iscommunication so how do you make surethat you’re communicating with yourvendors how do you make sure that you’reopening up lines of communication withsuppliers how do youyou create across city agencies how doyou communicate within City Hallfiguring it out there are creative waysfolks are moving we’ve we arerepositioning internally in order torespond to the crisis so understandingwho to talk to how to talk to them howto get them into a virtual room and withproviders we’re doing that through acentralized teamit’s the c19 HHS response team it is agroup of folks from mocksfrom our Office of Management and Budgetfrom City Hall teams deputy mayor teamswho come together to look at the sectoracross issue areas and create guidanceand information and channels forcommunication so that we can shareimmediately when we know things areshifting we can hear immediately fromthem when they need support it’s hard todeliver bad news there’s a lot of badnews being delivered but it has to bedelivered and we have to try to worktogether to figure out how to getthrough ityouthank you that I and from I think onbehalf of everyone on the call we wishyou the best as you confront this crisisMichael we’d love to also get theon-the-ground story in LA Countysorry I’m still trying to figurethis works so yes I think Jennifer hiton all of the big issues that we’re alsofacing we I actually just recently hadto initiate a purchasing freeze acrossacross the county we have a spendingfreeze as well we everything that we’vebeen doing in terms of the response tokovat has been extremely expensive andunlike you know the federal governmentor unlike even New York City we don’thave an our budgets only about thirtyfour billion which seems like a lotexcept it’s not the the on-the-groundstuff is interesting maybe I’ll go sinceJennifer hit like sort of the high-levelpieces which I think are very importantfor people to understand the I’ll go alittle bit a level below which is thatin LA I think this is the urgency andthe the level of sort of stress andintensity is something that I don’tthink anyone on my team or anyone thatI’ve spoken to across the region interms of the sourcing and procurement ofthese necessary PPEsor any anything else that we need interms of the response has been like noone’s no one’s ever experienced anythinglike this and I know New York inparticular has experienced it like ahundredfold right we’ve been lucky herewe are this is our second week of whatwas expected to be our peak and ourprojected deaths are lower now than theywere even three weeks ago were at arelatively decent Hospital capacity forICU beds as well as emergency room bedsand overall capacity but we did like itjust a couple weeks ago and if I if youcatch me looking down on my phone evennow we’re still at like that sort ofurgent critical level for certain typesof PPE there was a week where it wasactually easier for me to get forprivate planes willing to go pick uprespirators from China than it was forme to find legitrespirators right you go down all ofthese rabbit holes that take hours daysto figure out and you’re still I meanyou know and they come back with nothingI was on the phone with three M’s GlobalRisk team yesterday describing one ofthe rabbit holes that I went under andthey were telling me look we don’t haveany supply we don’t have this wouldprobably be good for people to know theydon’t have they don’t sell in Europe soif someone’s telling you that they’relike they have a cache of 3m 1860’s inEurope they don’t have that they don’tsell in Europe because of the regulatorystuff if someone from like the the lotconformant conformance documents are allproperly fake you know just I think onthe one hand you’re seeing the best inpeople and then on the other hand you’realso seeing the worst in people sothat’s what you’re seeing on the groundand I think it’s in some ways it’samazing because you know you know thatthe work that you’re doing which wasalways good which is always related tothe public good was making a differencebut now it’s potentially really savinglives on a daily basis so that’s reallygreat but that’s also like kind ofstressful for people and so if you can’tget something it’s really tragic andthen you’re feeling very desperate allthe time right and so I know somejurisdictions have been prepayingor you know doing the deposits or doingescrows as necessary we have not donethat because I’ve been we’ve been luckywe haven’t had to do that but also Ithink dan from New York came up withthis term but this gray market sourcingyou guys we just all have to be verycareful about it and so I’ll stop therebecause I think that gives you a littlebit of flavor of what we’re dealing withyeah and it’s true and it’s just aflavor what we’re dealing with and Ithink we’re going to talk more aboutsome of those challenges that youhighlighted for us as we continue thisconversationso speaking of challengesBantam I know that you have a backgroundand thinking about transparency andcommunity and engagement and these areboth certainly crucial factors right nowas you respond to this crisis butunfortunately transparency and communityengagementalso some of the first approaches thatgovernments can drop it at these times Ilove to hear about what you see is someof the main challenges right nowespecially in regards to these factorsyeah definitely so I think you knowtransparency in public access during atime of crisis is important andnecessary you know for the clarity intolike government decision-makingprocesses and it gives you know thepublic better reassurance about what thegovernment is doing right but it’s easyto drop like you mentioned right so wemust find flexible ways and resilientways to you know engage a residents in ameaningful conversation beyond just thecurrent crisis right is to give themaccess so the number one challenge rightis that all the the efforts that makeour cities thrive right such as townhalls public involvement efforts thatinclude large gatherings of crowds todaymake our cities vulnerable right tospread in the virus so how do we respondto that that’s the question right and sowe’re seeing how technology can help ussuch as having this panel virtuallyright but at the same time in thetechnology industry which I operate incan only adapt as fast as the city isopen to welcoming those types ofservices right through procurement orthrough you know direct allocation ofbudgets from a department or let’s saycity councilman’s office but the ideahere is that if citizens you know arebeing asked to stay at home and you knowfollow these ordinances which isimportant so that we can you know canfight the virus you know the citizensshould also demand from you know theirpublic officials more transparency inthe form of getting them involved in thepublic policy process and that could beby you know informing the public aboutyou know these meetings are taking placeon a daily basis or weekly basis and toproviding these available technologiesto maximize the real-time publicengagement but then you run into theissue of a digital divide right whereyou have a lot of folks in communitiesthat don’t even have access to internetright so it’s it’s a it’s a complexenvironment to operate in right whentalking about engaging the public duringa time of crisis in my case for examplewe launched a cove in nineteen supporttool that it’s a self screening tool aprice gouging and large gathering modulereporting to that is free for the publicwhy did we do that we were trying tofind a way to go through procurement butwe found that small startups dealingwith technology trying to help citieswe’re gonna have an uphill battle rightwhen introducing this type of tools orenvironments to cities and so we decidedto go ahead and give it out for free andthe response has been great it has alsohelped us you know establishrelationships with city governments thatbefore we had never talked to right andthe idea here is to also incentivizethose small and medium sized cities thatmaybe do not have access to you knowlarge technology platforms or Suitesfrom you know Oracle Motorola and so onright so as a start-up we understandthat smaller organizations such as smallcities and medium-sized cities run intoa lot of trouble right when trying topurchase this type of item so ourresponse was let’s give it out for youright and so the way we’re deploying itright is through advertisement indifferent cities in Texas and they usehas skyrocketed then what happens isthat we send emails to the governmentsabout the the use of the service and nowthey can access that the dashboard rightthat the product itself so we’ve seenhow like different methods can beapplied to this crisis when dealingright with procurement or being astart-up trying to work with governmentbut the reality is that it’s not easy isnot easy and I think you know we’regonna see more of how startups in thetechnology space working with citygovernments will find creative ways toto continue that relationship becausethings have become a little bit stagnantlike you mentioned earlier today inregards to the challenges that we’refacing with simple products such as facemask and otherof products will now imagine that thelayer of technology which is morecomplex it’s more difficult to make agovernment welcomed a technologycomponent you know without procurementor in an efficient and timely manner andthen even more you know the idea ofwhere do you find a budget when in thetime of crisis budget is of the essenceso those are some of the variables andchallenges that we face and how weovercame this challenge of working withcity government during a time of crisisthank you yeah one thing that we’ve alsoobserved at Fed OCP is just that a lotof the challenges that were already inplace are just magnified right now inthis crisis situation and someone whocan speak well to what’s happeningacross the country right now it’s Gregso Greg it does seem to be the HungerGames out there when it comes tosecuring some of the materials that weneed and everyone seems to be competingwith everyone so I’d love to get yourtake on what policy and coordinationchallenges you’ve seen and also whatstrategies you’ve seen that can help uslead to better results Thanks so yessimilar to the Hunger Games Icharacterized the current state ofprocurement and government is somethingbetween frantic and highly adaptive sortof the twin polls and we kind of heardthat from our speakers from the citiesas well today in our view you knowgovernments are having to buy thingsthey never bought before they buy themfaster than they’ve ever bought anythingbefore sometimes they’re trying toextend and repurpose existing contractsmake a decision about what’s anemergency and what’s not an emergency areal emergency and do all this whilewe’re working from home dealing withbudget shortfalls and still maintainingethics and transparency to BeddoesCommons the GPL has heard a lot recentlyabout states competing with each otherin sourcing ppl PPE but there’s actuallya lot of cooperation going on that wesee mainly at a regional level citiesand states are frequently in touch witheach other and with nationalorganizations like the nigp the NationalInstitute for governmental procurementand there were cities partners includingresults for Americasunlight foundation or ourselves just toshare tips and get ideas some of thethings we’re seeing happening right nowwe expect will end once we’re out ofthis and other things we certainly hopewill continue so we hope there’s someactually good things to pull out of thisin the endin terms of those things that expectwill end there’s been a move away fromcompetitive bidding for essential goodsand services to Michael’s point somesome of the sourcing that’s happeningjust trying to find stuff and not reallyworrying about the price or the sourceand trying to establish the service isthe legitimate or genuine source so forexample some action to deal with thisthe governor Connecticut Ned Lamontrecently exec issued an executive orderallowing for a waiver of competitivebidding in emergency situations only thecompetitive bid requirement is probablythe single most time-consuming processin procurement so it probably makessense to suspend that when you have animmediate need for PPE and their AOrestricts the waiver to Kogan relatedpurchases and they will go back tocompetitive bidding once Kogut is overso on to sort of those examples ofadjustments the government’s are makingto procurement practice that we hopewill continue one is the adjustment towork from home both for staff and forvendors procurement processes have beenheavily paper-based in many places andface to face going into the pandemic andgovernments have now been forced to moveto things like online vendor conferencesand online proposal submission no longerdo you have to drop off ten hard copiesof your proposal into a marked box andhave them you know tabbed andspiral-boundthat’s that will no longer be the caseNew Orleans had a requirement that thereare FP evaluation committee would meetto do evaluation scoring in an openpublic meeting which is great fortransparency I’d never actually seenthis anywhere else but it’s not so goodfor social distancing so a few weeks agoNew Orleans held their first onlineevaluation committee meeting in publicbut online and it went well so they’llbe doing this this way for theforeseeable futurethese kind of adaptations that get ridof outdated cumbersome practices we hopewill live on and the good permanentimprovements the procurement processand we see as repurposing of existingcontracts to adapt to the currentsituation another example from NewOrleans is the one-stop WorkforceServices vendor is now helping peoplewho are out of work to fill outapplications for unemployment insuranceand help them navigate the system and inDetroit we work with an office therethat formerly did lower income homerenovation projects they completelyshifted their efforts to help peopleapply for programs to be able to stay intheir homes so we’re seeing this kind offlexibility and adaptability happeningin many of the places we work and ittells me that in the future that statelocal governments will want to thinkmore broadly about the needs of thepeople they serve and work with vendorsand providers to figure out how to meetthose needs with more flexible andadaptable contracts our work at thegovernment performance lab generallytries to get governments to determinewhat results they want to achieve withcontracts and then design performancemeasures and senses to drive towardsthose results so we want to helpgovernments move away from just fundingactivities and toward funding outcomesand it turns out that what they’re doingin response to the crisis is actuallymoving them in this directionthey’re learning more about themarketplace some things that we neverthought we’d have to learn but certainlymoving in that direction they’recollaborating more with their serviceproviders to adapt contracts to newreality and they’re ready I think totake the next step of developingcontracts that reward innovation andresults and we’re happy to help themwith that stuff great thank you Gregalso thinking about solutions I’d loveto hear from you Marielle about the workthat you do with collaborativepurchasing and what other approachesyou’ve seen work well in this time yeahthanks so um Cobra cure helps localgovernments generally save time andtaxpayer dollars by sharing contractsand we serve a few hundred governmentsacross the United States so when westarted getting requests for help fromlocal governments looking for PPE westarted with what we knew which wascooperative contracts so as Craigmentioned like during non-emergencysituations governments typically have tobuy off of contracts creating createdexcuse me througha formal competitive bidding process andas an alternative to running a newcompetitive bidding process whichtypically takes like 4 to 24 monthsgovernments can buy from suppliers thatare already on contracts through thatother governments have created so byusing a shareable or cooperativecontract government buyers can can savetime and oftentimes also achieve costsavings through aggregated purchasingpower so our core product is a free toolthat helps governments find and buy fromthose suppliers available on cooperativecontract and we responded initially tothe PPE crisis by putting a list ofsuppliers together that were availableto sell those items that we were seeinggovernment’s needed to purchase throughexisting contracts the interesting thingwas that we realized that the problemthat we were solving for was no longercompliance so because it’s an emergencysituation the requirement to buy off ofcompetitively bid contracts has beenwaived for most agencies what werealized is that we were actuallysolving for this problem of trust assome of the other panelists havementioned especially in this momentwhich has been described as the WildWest of purchasing we are seeingextremely elevated levels of pricegouging competition counterfeit productsand fraud it’s a very chaotic situationand so it’s not surprising thatgovernment’s want to purchase fromsuppliers that other governments havealready purchased from because theytrust these suppliers more they’ve beenthrough a diligence process they’ve soldother government customers they havemore of a reputation because they’vebeen established for a long amount oftime so our initial response again ather procure was to help government sharethose suppliers that were alreadyavailable on contract but we also veryquickly experienced like this need is sogreat and many of those existingsuppliers quickly ran out of availableinventory many of them are starting tocome back online but there was a periodof a few weeks at least where the knownsuppliers that were available andtrusted had nothing or were unsure aboutwhen they would have inventory again andso we we really felt a need to supportlocal governments that we serve bystarting a source and diligence newsuppliers and so we very quickly learnedof course that actually sourcing newsuppliers isn’t hard sourcing real andnot fraudulent suppliers in other wordsdoing the diligence on the suppliers isthe really hard part and that’s becausethere’s limited time to conduct apotentially really complicated processthat in again normal times would requireboots on the ground seeing you know themanufacturers and the factories and soat on the one hand you know you have areally urgent need you have to movequickly if you want to get access toavailable inventory but on the otherhand like you’re being asked to purchasesomething that is inherently extremelyriskyso actually collaboration we foundbecomes really important here too andwhat I mean by that is not collaboratingto work together to create contracts butcollaborating together to to build trustand do that diligence process faster sowe’ve seen that local governments havebeen sharing the suppliers that they’reworking with so that other governmentscan fast-track their diligence andvetting process and what we’ve the rolethat we’ve played during this time onCobra cure is essentially helping tocollect and record those purchasingexperiences and then elevate newsuppliers that have successfully servedlocal governments before and have averified buyer reference to a listessentially of more vetted and trustedsuppliers you know I think it’s clearthat we need more collaboration we needto be buying together not just at thelocal government level but at thefederal level to compete on this Googlemarket for masks and other items andunfortunately in the absence of acoordinated federal response we’ve youknow we’ve seen some collaborationactivity like States you know Californiafor instance stepping up to purchasematerials and even sending some of thosematerials to other states and we haveseen some regional organizations likeone of our partners in the Kansas Citymetro area the mid-america RegionalCouncil leading regional efforts tosource PPE and aggregating thesepotentially smaller orders that wouldn’totherwise be able to get outto legit PPE supply together socollaboration is happening andpurchasing but not enough and once againat the local government level I thinkwe’ve seen coordination collaborationinvolving working together on diligenceand helping peer agencies navigate theWild West of of PPE purchasing and Ithink overall we’ve been reallyencouraged by how many local agencieshave provided feedback about suppliersto enable governments other governmentsto progress faster and with a higherlevel of trust during this this time ofneedgreat thank you Marielle sky so youstarted in your introduction to talk tous about some of the challenges that oursmall and medium businesses have had andwe’d love to hear more about what theseSMEs can do and what local governmentscan do to help make it through thiscrisis since they have been so hard hitand will be so important as part of ourrecovery efforts yes thank youdefinitely very important to help smallbusinesses now more than ever so firstand foremost I want to say that I reallysympathize with our government agencyprocurement professionals right now Iknow it is not easy the things thatMichael and Jennifer have sharedwe’ve been talking to lots ofprocurement some executives are allacross the country both on the privateand in public sector and it is a hardtime especially when you’re in theimmediate crisis situation right and andMichael and I have talked about thisseveral times before but if I want totake a step back for a second becauseyes technology can help I think what weneed is a shift in mentality thementality of government procurement andbado mentioned this as well governmentprocurement has always been historicallya very offline very in-person processthat’s really designed more for largecompanies it is that no one ever accusedsi P or Oracle on being a user-friendlysystem but those are the systems thatare most often used and right now weneed innovation we need a new way ofthinking we need to come together asMary was mentioning to be able to dothis in a centralized effort and that’snot how the system is instead of rightnow I’m really hoping that now thatwe’re starting hopefully starting tomove out of that immediate panicsituation into how do we think aboutmaking changes for the long term to helpbenefit things we can we can reallyassess the fact that we need morecentralized systems across the board andwe need to make things easier I knowthat the tendency is to go after peopleto go after suppliersyou have worked with for a long timebefore but we’ve talked about this onthis call you can’t always use the samepeople over and over again and by theway most of those home suppliers are notminority and women-owned businessesbecause it’s traditionally very hard forthem people who are getting hardest inthis in this Kovach crisis areminorities both from the healthperspective and from a financialperspective yet there there’s a ton ofinnovation that’s happening in thisspaceand we know several small businesseseven in the LA area who have said wewant to help we can repurpose oursystems to be able to make things thatpeople need right now to be able to makePPE and supply those but where do we gowho do we go to so on the one hand whilethe the traditional mentality is let’smake this easier so let’s create anotherwebsite for people to go to that is justa little bit 19 related in focus and canbypass some of these long lengthyprocesses it actually can exacerbate theproblem because if you have every agencythen already having their traditional nowebsites and paths and then on top ofthat now we have these new Comid-nineteen different websites andpaths and there’s no coordination amongthem it’s mass confusion and mass chaosand me the impetus is on moving quicklybecause small businesses are dying outby the hundreds and thousands right nowwe’ve been beating this drum for thepast three and a half years but it hasnever been more evident than it is rightnow that small businesses are thebackbone of this economy make up half ofall employment and we’re seeing thisright now I know we’re talking aboutlocal local governments but I have toshare this out with you because it wasjust so mind-boggling for me that theSBA received over 44 million loanapplications from small businesses thereare 30 point 2 million small businessesin the United States ok so when I talkto them I said well how do we have thiswell what’s the issue and they said wellnumber one the biggest issue is thatthere is when you apply for a loanthrough the SBA you don’t receive anemail saying that your application wasreceived so first and foremost peopledon’t even know if their application canreceive so now they’re just we havein multiple places right but butsecondly no one knows there’s nocommunication there’s no transparency asvidoes mentioning and no status updatesor anything so you don’t know if whereyou are in the queue if they’re gonnaget to you money is running out etc somillions of small businesses will notmake it and though it is really hardand people are pulling back on theirprocurement budgets we have to find away to work with more small and minorityand women-owned businesses because thisis the crux of the economy and I thinkit’s the best way to do that is tocentralize efforts and make the processeasier for everyoneperiod and that’s really what we’ve doneand what we focus on and a bazaar isjust a centralized procurement andsourcing process where you have thatlinked in for the supply chain so youhave that centralized aggregated oneplace to find and vet suppliers and thenhave your procurement your RFP processand an RFP process I think I hope we aredone with the days of 375 page partiesright can I just put it out there rightnow like that needs to end because we’veseen that we can get things done so muchfast they’re so much more efficient ifwe don’t have that in the vetting youknow we’ve heard people say well if youdon’t have those long RFPs you know wecan’t get through the vetting processthese are two different things these aretwo different things one thing is whatis the need let’s focus on the need andhave needs-based procurements and agileprocurement methodology and the othercomponent is betting so while there’sthere are some things that smallbusinesses can do I’m to better fromyour familiarize themselves withdifferent processes I really think thethe biggest thing that will help is tobe able to centralized governmentsystems a habbit coordinated to make ituser-friendly and just to make it easierso that we can get through procurementand it doesn’t take ya six months to ayear for every procurement processthat’s astrong strong message to end on andbefore we go to our open conversation Ihave one final question for ourpanelists and that’s if you could answerin one sentence as we emerge from thesereally challenging times what are thelessons that you hope that the people onthis call will take away from ourcurrent experience to improve ourrecovery efforts as you move ahead andwe can start with NATO governments tendto be reactive not proactive these timeshave really changed the way thatgovernments are adapting to differenttrends and with that I think comes thisresponsibility right from the privatesector or small businesses or startupsto support governments in this trial youknow in their period and the way thatlooks like is by you know launchinginitiatives or pilots that can supportgovernments in addressing and you knowfighting this type of viruses like Ovidbecause I think you know as we see onthe news and we read more of these thesecrisis may become prolonged and we mayhave waves of these virus right so thequestion is as government will continueto adapt what is the private sector whatare small businesses and startups goingto do to support these governments inthe next wave or situations where we’regonna find challenges regards to healthgreat thank you and JenniferyouI guess if I’m limited to one sentientaspiration I think Michael Oh may agreeI think digital procurement is just morecritical than ever I mean it touchesupon when everybody said if you have acentralized I think sky was talkingabout centralized I was taking notes asfolks were talking this guy’s talkingabout centralized Greg’s talking abouteliminating paper and duplicativepractices thanos talking abouttransparency Mariel is talking aboutsourcing if you have a digitalend-to-end system that is managing thewhole process that is providingtransparency for all that’s collectingdata and information how critical isdata and information to responding tothis crisis knowing who’s on thefrontlines knowing who their clients areknowing how many people are being servedknowing where to get your PPE I mean allof that is data that could be stored ina central system and utilized inemergencies like this so I think the onetakeaway is cities need to really getmoving on digital procurement and as Imentioned before Michael and Dan Simonat mocs were really leaders in thisspace certainly for the city of New Yorkwhich is you know one of the largest Ithink we are the largest in the in thecountry in really moving to a digitalplatform to touch all of these goalsthat are all critical in an emergencysituation and also in an everydaysituation great thank you and sky whatare your thoughts while it is criticalto go digital and have digital systems Idon’t think it’s enough I think it hasto be digital user-friendly systems thatmake it easier for both participants touse I mean the amount of times that Ihave edge I personally educated thegovernment of procurement staff on theirown government procurement processes tobe able to accomplish their goals is usdownso yes digitization user-friendly andcentralization is extremely importantand everyone needs to be focused on howdo we do that prevent to prevent thisfrom happening again thank youand Michael yes I would just echo whateveryone else said the one thing that Iwould add is I think in a situation likethis shows you what we are capable of ifwe have to act quickly that I think wehave to be critical about just becausewe can act quickly doesn’t mean that weshould get rid of all of the controlsthat we have in place or the vettingthat we have in place that we need to dobut as you scale up and and go digitalyou should also think about just whatkind of what processes don’t need toexist right because you have that levelof transparency on that level processand you know I think transparencyvisibility all of that is good but italso doesn’t work if you don’t have thetalent and the people who are able andwilling to to actually implement andmake it work and I think that’s that’s afar bigger challenge for all of us thatwe have to invest in thank you Marioyeah I mean I think we do have an havealways had really big common challengesand we tend to handle them at the localgovernment level in a fairly fragmentedway and so we really do need to buildprocurement collaboration muscles forfaster and more effective and inclusiverecovery and I think a lot of that goesback to you know open free availabledata for governments to be able to shareon board suppliers including smallbusinesses when are your own and womenand businesses and essentially like notrepeat and reinvent the wheel everysingle time but to elevate up and bubbleup the things that are working and thegood work that is being done becauseit’s legally possible to share it andthe technology exists it just has notbeen applied in in this domain as muchas it could be so I think thiscollaboration infrastructure and it’ssomething we’re working to build ATCOprocure will be even more essentialduring the recovery than ever beforethank you and Greg you the final wordthanks Kay so I think this is somethingthat Jennifer touched on but werecognized more than ever I thinkthrough this experience that weco-create government services withprivate and nonprofit sectors and so wego back to our lessons learned generallyunderstand the marketplace and engagewith providers collaborate with serviceproviders in an equitable way andshaping what your what your purchasingand develop contracts that rewardinnovation and results great thank youso we’d hoped to reserve some time forall of you here on the call tocontribute your thoughts and your ideasand your questions I am glad to see thatmany of you have already been having alively chat but now is your moment toadd your voices as wellso if you would like to say somethingplease leave a message in the chat OhRory would you like to unmute yourselfan industrial question directly to folksyouhi my name is Jerry McDonald I work withthe University of Oxford’s governmentoutcomes lab we are thinking about howsocial services are changing and how thesocial services and outcomes aroundsocial services need to exchange andadjust and flex but I have a questionthat is more directly related to what Iheardjust now and the question related youknow is are you capturing and sharinginformation about a performance andquality it strikes me is relatively easyto share information about the entityname contract award or price is paid butyou’ve all talked about the importanceof trust how do you digitize trust yeahI can I can start with that so with abetter platform with avasara we have ashared collaborative infrastructure thatallows everyone on meeting multiplegovernment agencies and jurisdictions toshare access to one network of vendorswhich is a centralized ever-growingnetwork and each agency can includetheir own notes about that that vendorand their experiences with that vendorand which we wanted to share acrossagencies the difference is the issue isthat legally a lot of different agenciesare not allowed to share thatinformation with each otherand sometimes not even within otherdepartments within the same organizationso that has been a challenge andcontinues to be a challenge it issomething that we are actively workingon but that’s that’s one of the bigreasons why it hasn’t just existedeverywhere right now because becauselegally you can’t do that and that issuch a great question if anyone from thepanel or others on the call would liketo contribute feel free to unmuteyourselves and and let us know yourthoughts yeah I would just say this is ahuge thing that’s missing in procurementin general is like we spend so much timeand effort getting through thecontracting process and then and I’msure Greg can share a ton more but it’slike and then what happens you know wehad a contractthat existed we had a supplier that didsome work but what were the results whatwere the outcomes that part is so oftenunfortunately missing from the contractmanagement you know process and cycleand it typically you know to myknowledge and in my experience it isn’tcollected in a very standardized processor shared publicly and asked I mentionedthere are some challenges around how doyou design that work and how do youshare it from a legal perspective it’sbeen fascinating I think by necessitykoper curious found ourselves likeasking for feedback basically just in amore binary right around like is thesupplier real and did the stuff that youordered arrived like on time did it meetyour quality expectations etc so it’s avery it’s a very simple rubric for nowand it’s simpler obviously to whenyou’re talking about like commodities orit’s like did it show up was the productlegit it’s much harder and morecomplicated and again I’m sure Gregg hasa lot of experience here but to evaluateservices in part because the way we askor have asked for things occasionally ingovernment as well doesn’t always set upthe relationship for success so it’stricky and it’s really needed and I hopeyou know we have as we think aboutthings that we’re taking in to this kindof new normal that we’re establishingyou know that’s one of the things Ithink I’m excited about where we aregetting more feedback from from buyersand seeing governments sharing thatexperience more and more again just oncommodities for now but we’ll see howthat changes ingress I’m sorry I justwanted up services I’m and Brian andMuriel I’d say this applies to socialservices but equally to technologyservices and capital projects those kindof things we go so far as to say that inyour RFP and this helps with thelegality of it you should indicate thatif you’re as successful and win thecontract under that we’re going to doregular performance checks and thatinformation could be used in makingfuture procurement decisions within amunicipality or that state but wehaven’t gone so far as to say that thatdata which is going to be kind of uniqueto that city or state could be sharedwith otherand I think that the consistency of itthere’s there’s a lot of issues with youknow the you know whether thatsubjective data or subject to data andbut we put it up front than the RFP sothat at least we feel generally as alegal basis for collecting it and usingit focusing government Oh Jennifer I wasjust in the city of New York performanceevaluations are part of the standardpractice contract management I there’scertainly room for improvement but as abasic activity it’s required for all ofour human service contracts and then youknow for goods you have other ways ofevaluating etc but for our servicesperformance evaluations are part of theregular practice they’re also actuallydigitized through our passport platformthey’re actually managed in passportthey’re available for other agencies tolook at when they’re makingdeterminations around a vendorsresponsibility level of responsibilityfor an award and a contract so we haveit centralized and there’s alsoopportunities in our legislation andregulations for general access toperformance evaluation so on the verysort of basic level we have it we’reusing it and thinking about how we canmake them stronger as well hi my name isJudy save you and I’m actually callingfrom Bermuda but I’m on the board ofsomething called a vision spring andsome of you may be familiar with it it’swon a lot of awards they normallyprovide eyeglasses to the basically tothe developing world to the masses forthe first time ever we’re looking atrepurposing our contacts in producingeyewear to making goggles face masksprotective shields etc and focusing onthe US market for the first time so theone of the reasons I’m gonna ask themkronfeld one of the reasons I was veryinterested in this call was to figureout we don’t really have a system foroffering what we normally offer toplaces like India or Ghana for the USthe particular urban us when we see allthese obvious problems so one of thethings I wanted to ask is how would anorganization likebring the does six million dollars worthof work a year how might it access orfind out where is the greatest need forthings like the PPE that we can accessfrom our various sources so it gets tothe the most underserved places ataffordable prices so we’re we haveproducts we want to get it to the rightplaces and find an efficient way ofdoing that helping the neediest first atan affordable price any ideas of how toefficiently do that quickly thank youthe city of New York has a centralizedsourcing webpage so I can I can sendthat along here the link to that butMoxa’s worked with the city to set up aspace for folks and businesses likeyourself to be able to submitinformation about goods and servicesthat are available for the köppen reliefso I can send that to everybody on thechat box Jennifer does that mean doesthat say any and the county and theTransit Authority and the othersurrounding agencies I’m sorry what’syour questiondoes that say if you’re mentioning isthat encompass the county and theTransit Authority and the other agencieswithin the the greater area it’s for thecity of New York and if you’re familiarwith the city of New York we have likeour mayoral agencies and then we havethe agencies that are like hybrids likenature’s like that do we is like thatI’m not sure I my instinct is that it’scovering all of those agencies as wellbut don’t don’t quote me on that butcertainly you’re gonna be covering atleast the 40 mayoral and it’s going intoa centralized hub that is then you knowtaking the next steps with those leavesand where where the need is the greatestand and figuring out how to move productand services along so mythe neural response would be go ifyou’re interested in making yourselfknown just submit and then you know takeit from there and see where that goesgreat and those of you who have otherthoughts feel free to follow up directlywith students she’s put her contactinformation there I know that Dustin hada question and I think it’sunfortunately we were running out oftime I think this is a good one for usto end on yeah and I’ll and the topicmay lead to another panel or some suchso so I’m just linear I’m a formerprocurement officer and we work withprocurement shops around the countrywe’re currently doing new normal designexercises with several public entitiesincluding a major city and the theconcept on that is that we’re not goingback to where we were because there’s noback right where we are in the responseis going to continue and so there’sthings about the procurementorganization that we’ve put on holdwhile we’re dealing with this there’sgoing to still need to be really in putso I’m curious from the entities thatare doing the government side like theNew York and the LA like how are youboth dealing with the current and thenplanning to bring everything else thatyou’ve been doing that you’ve beenhaving to put on hold so that doesn’tbecome the next crisis has that beenpart of your thought process and how areyou how are you trying to address thatMichael you want to go first or sureso yeah the so the county we have somelevel of technical functionality toprovide for online sourcing onlinecontract management online digitalsignatures it’s not I mean frankly it’snot coherent and it’s not built in a waythat allows for easy reporting and it’snot in a place where I want it and sothat was part of my goal I’ve only beenhere for about a year and so part ofthis past year was socializing everyoneand also developing a strategic plan forour next three years which included atransformation a digitalas well as a process one that obviouslytakes resources and it’s unclear rightnow whether or not I’m gonna have theresources to be able to do that so wemight just have to use some belts insuspenders approach in the near termwhile we you know while we figure outwhat our path going forward it’s gonnabe that’s that’s really the the sort ofhigh level answer I do want to stress soyou know when you talk about procurementand we we’ve we touched on this a littlebit is we I think focus a lot on thesourcing right on the competitiveelements and or finding the vendor andgoing to an RFP process we I think GPLdoes a really great job of focusing onthe other important elements likecontract management which I thinkfrankly will be a lot harder to do inthe new normal if we’re not gonna beable to go send people or people don’tfeel comfortable going out into thefield if we have to socially distance ifwe you know there’s a lot of stuff thatI think that as we’ve as we thinkthrough what the 18 what the next 18 to24 months is gonna be like it it’s veryclosely connected to how we as a countryin the world are gonna respond to thisglobal pandemic right it’s not somethingthat even we’re not guaranteed a vaccineso how are we gonna actually keep try tokeep things at this at this at leastworkable level and if it’s gonna haveworkforce implications its that willthat will sort of flow down to where weare today right and so I think that’sgoing to be really challenging for usyeah so how do we maintain I think yourquestion is how do you maintain theregular work while you’re responding toa crisis situation we machs we have theresources we began building a digitalsystem a couple years ago so we have theresources in place we have a quite a bigteam now in place and sooh we’re able to you know in positionourselves internally to new sorts ofteams that work on responding every dayevery hour to the twists and turns ofkovin 19 while still ensuring that wehave folks around and available to keepbuilding out digital procurement we’regoing live with a third major release ofour platform in the next couple ofmonths and that will bring allsignatures online and remove notaries asMichael had mentioned it’s just so muchmore than just the store saying it’sgonna take the whole process from endand online so we continue to build we’recreating new ways of testing we used tobring vendors and agencies into mocks toactually get into the system and try tobreak it we can’t do that now it’s anit’s much more complicated to just sharescreens when you’re in a testingenvironment so thinking of new ways todo that but yeah moving forward becauseas we can see now more than evertransformation to our procurementpractice is essential so we have to keepour eyes on on that road thank you somuch and I can’t imagine better wordsfor us to end onso with that over to Jennifer forclosing commentsyeah um first of all I’m just delightedum how many folks have remained on thecall particularly Michael and Jenniferthank you so much for taking this timeto share your resources and also Michaelparticularly giving us insight about thestresses that you’re under I just wantto honor what all of you are goingthrough and all of you who are on thecall who are doing this frontlineday-to-day procurement this you knowpeople laugh about oh procurement godthat’s so boring it’s essential it’slife-saving right this is a big part ofwhat government does and so it’s reallykind of an honor to be able to spotlightand support that work particularly nowI’m a couple things that Ireally struck me on the call is thisnotion of solving for trust as we goforward what are the new ways that we’regoing to use to solve for trust if youlook at the development of procurementsystems previously the way we solved fortrust was a lot of rules and a lot oflawyers I’m trained as a lawyer I cansay stuff like that are there new fastermore flexible more accessible moreinclusive ways to solve for trusts howdo we how do we solve that problem usingnew technology tools and this also thisnotion of a shift in mentality if we cancreate faster and more flexibleprocesses imperfect ones but faster moreflexible processes for equipment that’sliterally life and death presumablythere is a little bit more flexibilityand experimentation in the system forsome of the run-of-the-mill supplies andservices that governments do so I thinkthis can open up the thinking andperhaps give city and state and countyleaders right the county executives themayor’s really a powerful impetus tomake procurement change andaccessibility more visible and perhaps apriority in for their administration andwe have all of these entities who youknow have been on the call who are partof OCP who are in the Aspen Network whocan help so I really look forward tothinking about what we can do togetherthrough this crisis and then as we startto rebuild what a procurement systemmight look like again that can be fasteffective efficient and equitable sothat the people who are supplying ourcities are as diverse and wonderful andamazing as the people who are living inand leading our cities so thanks so muchfor your time and thoughts for today
Selling to government could be a way for these small business owners to stay afloat when consumers and other businesses are scaling back even more. Yes, local government budgets are tight, but at the same time, local governments won’t actually shut their doors. They will buy less, but they still have to spend money.
The strain on supply chains has been exacerbated by existing flaws in the public procurement system, such as antiquated and bureaucratic policies, low levels of transparency, lack of digitization, and weak coordination. On our call that we co-organized with the Open Contracting Partnership, procurement experts said that they are seeing changes in procurement for life-saving supplies, which shows that it’s possible to be more flexible and creative during the recovery and afterwards.
Collaborate to expand the vendor pool
Local governments are sharing information on suppliers of emergency medical equipment through open and public lists, such as one facilitated by CoProcure. By collaborating with each other to identify legitimate vendors through performance information, local governments have been able to fast-track their diligence and vetting process for new suppliers and get the items they need faster.
“When we started [the list] we did what we knew, which was cooperative purchasing,” said Mariel Reed, Founder and CEO of CoProcure. “Then we realized that the problem we were solving for was no longer compliance, we were actually solving for this problem of trust.”
welcome to everyone my name is Kay I amfrom open contracting partnership andfor those of you who are less familiarwith open contracting partnership we area nonprofit that works in the UnitedStates and abroad to make publiccontracting more efficient open anddeliver better results for everyone wework with governments civil society andthe private sector and as we’ve beensupporting our partners over these lastfew weeks on emergency procurement we’velearned just how important the role ofopen and efficient procurement is forhelping to manage this crisis and whenwe came together in Aspen it was soclear to us that there was an urgentneed for a space for a conversation withmembers from across the procurementecosystem about how we are respondingfor code to cope at 19 and every dayit’s more apparent that the fiscalimpact of coab at 19 is unprecedented inthese times we really must make the mostout of our limited public money that wehave to effectively fight the virusprotect our populations as well as veryimportantly to rebuild our economy weare very eager to hear from our amazingselection of panelists and all of youabout the challenges that you’reexperiencing and the practices that arehelping you to get better resultsespecially around open data transparencyand collaboration quick overview of ouragenda the first half of our call willbe a discussion with our chart ofpanelists and then we’re going to try tohold back at least 20 minutes for anopen conversation with all of you thisis not a webinar we really intend forthis to be an open space for us to havea conversation and collaborate we feelthat there are so many great people onthe call today and we want to make surethat we hear your voices and all thatyou have to share and contribute soquick ground rules we know that there’sa lot of people on the call today so weask that you follow our guidance to makesure that it’s a welcome and safe spacefor everyone we invite you to make agenerous use of the chat function andthe sidebars youget your comments in and questions wealso would love it if you wouldcontribute to the document which we’vebeen sharing around earlier with ournotes and and when the time comes to askour panelists questions I’ll be keepingtrack of who is asking what and duringthe open conversation I will be makingsure that I am met and we are callingpeople in the order that they volunteerwe also ask that you keep your commentsand questions brief given just how manypeople are in our call todaysavvy everyone has a chance and lastlyas as is our new reality since we’re onsoon please keep yourself on you if youare not talking now that all thathousekeeping is out of the wayI am honored to introduce you toJennifer Bradley the founding directorof the Aspen Institute for the Centerfor urban innovation who will set outthe framework context for the call todaythanks so much kay I really appreciatethe opportunity to be here I’m extremelygrateful to all of our panelists whohave made the time in this incrediblybusy and urgent period that we’re livingin to talk about the importance ofprocurement the Center for urbaninnovation works with leaders in citygovernment nonprofits philanthropies andthe private sector to make sure thatlocal innovation agendas are alignedwith inclusion and equity imperatives wewere drawn to procurement as a topicbecause procurement is essential to bothinnovation and equity and procurement isparticularly in the spotlight these daysand under great pressure as citygovernments are working very hard to getthe emergency equipment that we needwe’re so glad to work with OCT on thiscall to help folks understand whatresponses are working now to getessential supplies and servicesdelivered and we also want to understandwhere responses are falling short andhow to close the gap particularly onquestions of equity often I think theapproach that that many people have toequity is that it’s something that youcan do in good timebut in case of emergency it’s all aboutsort of efficiency and power purchasingbut particularly given that equityimplications of who’s being hit hardestby Kovac 19 both economically and in ahealth perspective we understand thatequity can’t wait equity has to be apart of everything so I’m particularlyinterested in hearing how governmentsare trying to make sure that theyfulfill their equity commitments duringthis emergency time and finally we wantto learn about what the emergency isteaching us that can guide how localgovernments buy services and suppliesduring the recovery and afterwards canthis crisis cede lessons for localgovernments and the larger ecosystem ofsmall business and procurement to bemore flexible more transparent morecollaborative and more equitable so I’mextremely excited for this discussiontoday and we’ll turn it back over to Kaygreat Thank You Jennifer now we reallydo have a terrific group of paneliststoday so I’m going to ask you tointroduce yourselves and let us knowwhat you have been doing to keep seeingduring these crazy times and let’s getstarted with you better hey everyone myname is Betty Medina I’m the CEO andco-founder at iris we buildcollaborative platforms to engage thepublic from we have the government toResidence what am i doing to stay sane Ibought this peloton before this crisisand it was the best purchase that I madeso far I’m writing that thing every dayso that’s keeping me sane wonderful andJennifer from New York City hi goodafternoon thanks for inviting the cityof New York happy to be here torepresent us I’m from the mayor’s officeof contract services and our officeoversees about 20 billion dollars worthof annual procurement that’s across 40city agencies we have a team of over6,000 procurement staff across the citywe have 15,000 vendors and slightly morethan that actually who are registered todo business with the cityso the scope of our work is quite broadand we are currently pursuing technologyinitiatives to digitize procurementacross the city of New Yorkwhile we are also supporting the city inour kovat relief response I amparticular oversee policy andpartnerships inside mosques and thatmeans that I’m working to cultivaterelationships with our vendorcommunities as Jennifer flagged equitybeing a particular interest we spend alot of time working with mwbes as wellas human service nonprofits which we’llget to I think in a little bit when westart talking about our response interms of what keeps me sane honestly thework is tremendous right now having thethe perspective that we have in the cityhaving a structure having so much to doevery day helps to keep me keep memotivated keep us motivated keep usmoving a glass of wine often helps and Iagree with beta that peloton especiallytheir new online apps are welcomedistraction great and Jennifer is Danjoining us today or not yeah I thinkit’s just nice to on the phonemmm all right so in that case it is overto Skye hi everyone Skye Kelley founderand CEO of a bazaar we are a procurementsourcing vendor registration and acertification platform all combined intoone like a LinkedIn for the supply chainwith a special emphasis on helping smallbusinesses I’m especially minority andwomen-owned businesses contract withgovernments at the local level and afederal you did this again as thatLinkedIn for the supply chain so what’skeeping me saying these days it’s hardto say saying it really is let me justput that out there I think one of thethings that’s helping is that we reallyyou are we are able to help our localgovernments able to go online anddigitized in a time and fashion and veryquickly when they need it most we areable to help small businesses which asall of you know small businesses arereally suffering right now especiallyminority and women-owned businesses theyare suffering the most and so being ableto provide that both that voice both atthe local level and assistance as wellas now at the federal level being ableto share the experiences of our smallbusinesses and advocate on behalf ofthem and make sure that we are movinginto this new era is really helpingoutside of that I don’t have a peloton Iactually hate exercise bikes it’s justit doesn’t work for me but I havestarted to do online workout classes inthe last couple of days I’m gonna behonest not before then so that is that’swhat’s helping that’s helping great andMichael Angelo’s here yes I’m here sorryI am sorry I’ve been a little bit crazythis morning so am I just supposed tointroduce myself just enjoy yourself yepkeep going and then I’m such a zoomNewby I’m terrible at this sorry my nameis Michael oh I’m the purchasing agentand general manager for the internalservices department for the County ofLos Angeles I have only been with thecounty for about a year I am NOT sayingright now so I’m not doing anything tokeep myself saying and very happy to beinteracting with OCP and Jennifer who isthe best facilitator I’ve ever seen inaction sky a good friend and all of youand Jennifer who I love who I hired andone day will hire me and thank you forinviting me well that’s it that’s anintrowe are also very excited to have all ofyou with us really is it a wonderfulpanel and our next terrific panelist isMario everyone I’m Mario Reed I’m aformer public servant and co-founder ofcopra care we’re a mission drivenstartup that supports more transparentefficient and inclusive publicprocurement especially focused at thelocal level and we do that by helpinglocal governments find and sharecontracts across the country yeah Ithink everyone sanity has become arelative thing I agree with the winehappening oftentimes a little bitearlier in the evening but yeah myhusband and I got a puppy back inJanuary which feels like years ago andhe’s been a huge source of entertainmentfor us those and a good excuse also toget outside for some socially distancefresh air and exercise he’s also madesome guest appearances on our zoom teammeetings on Cobra cure so he’soccasionally chimes in there as wellhe’s welcome to contribute to thismeeting as well if that happens Gregyou’re the last one hi I’m Greg wass andwith the government performance lab atthe Harvard Kennedy School the GPLconducts research and provides technicalassistance to state and localgovernments and how they can improve theresults that they achieve for theirconstituents particularly throughcontracting I want to shout out to OscarHernandez who’s in the audience herefrom OCP for inviting me to join today’spanel thanks Oscar good to see you andlet’s see to stay sane I guess I’dbecome a bit of a farmer we’ve beengrowing our own sprouts and we kind of asprout starter and we just planted somedill outside got some good weather it’svery cool so we do miss people but we’recommuning with our plants here that’sgreat so now that we’ve talked about allthe things that are keeping us sane I’mafraid we’re gonna have to go back intothe craziness that is our currentreality and I think that no one isbetter prepared to speak about just thechallengeand the real craziness of these timesthen Jennifer is based in New York Cityso Jennifer my first question is for youwe would really love to hear about youron the ground perspective I’m sure thatwe could talk a whole hour about thisreallybut yeah we’re just working on andseeing in New York City yeah for sureum I guess there’s a few ways ofthinking about it there’s the nuts andbolts challenges in the weeds technicalpieces such as sourcing PPE I mean we’reall familiar with the hourly newsbroadcasts around our blog howeveryou’re catching your information aroundthe struggles with sourcing ventilatorstesting now so across the board that’sbeen challenging we experienced it evenin the most sort of basic way and justtrying to get masks and gloves justacross the the world really folks arestretched on trying to get thoseresources so you have some of thattechnical challenges that you’re seeingevery day on the ground and trying to becreative and trying to move quicklybecause lives literally depends on itand then there are some sort of biggerstructural challenges that are changingand surfacing every day one is theeconomic financial challenges that we’refacing there’s a loss in tax revenuethere’s high unemployment how do youdetermine which services to maintainwhich services to modify which ones needto be cut in the city of New York asit’s true for many of the cities acrossthe country human services are deliveredby nonprofits but they’re essentially abranch of the government and so how doyou ensure that you maintain thoseservices you maintain thoseorganizations they’re important now andthey’re going to be important when weget through this period of time andmoving forward so how do you think aboutthat given the economic climate and theother piece that is sort of a challengeand one that we’re trying we always tryto grapple with and we’re coming up withnew ways of addressing it here iscommunication so how do you make surethat you’re communicating with yourvendors how do you make sure that you’reopening up lines of communication withsuppliers how do youyou create across city agencies how doyou communicate within City Hallfiguring it out there are creative waysfolks are moving we’ve we arerepositioning internally in order torespond to the crisis so understandingwho to talk to how to talk to them howto get them into a virtual room and withproviders we’re doing that through acentralized teamit’s the c19 HHS response team it is agroup of folks from mocksfrom our Office of Management and Budgetfrom City Hall teams deputy mayor teamswho come together to look at the sectoracross issue areas and create guidanceand information and channels forcommunication so that we can shareimmediately when we know things areshifting we can hear immediately fromthem when they need support it’s hard todeliver bad news there’s a lot of badnews being delivered but it has to bedelivered and we have to try to worktogether to figure out how to getthrough ityouthank you that I and from I think onbehalf of everyone on the call we wishyou the best as you confront this crisisMichael we’d love to also get theon-the-ground story in LA Countysorry I’m still trying to figurethis works so yes I think Jennifer hiton all of the big issues that we’re alsofacing we I actually just recently hadto initiate a purchasing freeze acrossacross the county we have a spendingfreeze as well we everything that we’vebeen doing in terms of the response tokovat has been extremely expensive andunlike you know the federal governmentor unlike even New York City we don’thave an our budgets only about thirtyfour billion which seems like a lotexcept it’s not the the on-the-groundstuff is interesting maybe I’ll go sinceJennifer hit like sort of the high-levelpieces which I think are very importantfor people to understand the I’ll go alittle bit a level below which is thatin LA I think this is the urgency andthe the level of sort of stress andintensity is something that I don’tthink anyone on my team or anyone thatI’ve spoken to across the region interms of the sourcing and procurement ofthese necessary PPEsor any anything else that we need interms of the response has been like noone’s no one’s ever experienced anythinglike this and I know New York inparticular has experienced it like ahundredfold right we’ve been lucky herewe are this is our second week of whatwas expected to be our peak and ourprojected deaths are lower now than theywere even three weeks ago were at arelatively decent Hospital capacity forICU beds as well as emergency room bedsand overall capacity but we did like itjust a couple weeks ago and if I if youcatch me looking down on my phone evennow we’re still at like that sort ofurgent critical level for certain typesof PPE there was a week where it wasactually easier for me to get forprivate planes willing to go pick uprespirators from China than it was forme to find legitrespirators right you go down all ofthese rabbit holes that take hours daysto figure out and you’re still I meanyou know and they come back with nothingI was on the phone with three M’s GlobalRisk team yesterday describing one ofthe rabbit holes that I went under andthey were telling me look we don’t haveany supply we don’t have this wouldprobably be good for people to know theydon’t have they don’t sell in Europe soif someone’s telling you that they’relike they have a cache of 3m 1860’s inEurope they don’t have that they don’tsell in Europe because of the regulatorystuff if someone from like the the lotconformant conformance documents are allproperly fake you know just I think onthe one hand you’re seeing the best inpeople and then on the other hand you’realso seeing the worst in people sothat’s what you’re seeing on the groundand I think it’s in some ways it’samazing because you know you know thatthe work that you’re doing which wasalways good which is always related tothe public good was making a differencebut now it’s potentially really savinglives on a daily basis so that’s reallygreat but that’s also like kind ofstressful for people and so if you can’tget something it’s really tragic andthen you’re feeling very desperate allthe time right and so I know somejurisdictions have been prepayingor you know doing the deposits or doingescrows as necessary we have not donethat because I’ve been we’ve been luckywe haven’t had to do that but also Ithink dan from New York came up withthis term but this gray market sourcingyou guys we just all have to be verycareful about it and so I’ll stop therebecause I think that gives you a littlebit of flavor of what we’re dealing withyeah and it’s true and it’s just aflavor what we’re dealing with and Ithink we’re going to talk more aboutsome of those challenges that youhighlighted for us as we continue thisconversationso speaking of challengesBantam I know that you have a backgroundand thinking about transparency andcommunity and engagement and these areboth certainly crucial factors right nowas you respond to this crisis butunfortunately transparency and communityengagementalso some of the first approaches thatgovernments can drop it at these times Ilove to hear about what you see is someof the main challenges right nowespecially in regards to these factorsyeah definitely so I think you knowtransparency in public access during atime of crisis is important andnecessary you know for the clarity intolike government decision-makingprocesses and it gives you know thepublic better reassurance about what thegovernment is doing right but it’s easyto drop like you mentioned right so wemust find flexible ways and resilientways to you know engage a residents in ameaningful conversation beyond just thecurrent crisis right is to give themaccess so the number one challenge rightis that all the the efforts that makeour cities thrive right such as townhalls public involvement efforts thatinclude large gatherings of crowds todaymake our cities vulnerable right tospread in the virus so how do we respondto that that’s the question right and sowe’re seeing how technology can help ussuch as having this panel virtuallyright but at the same time in thetechnology industry which I operate incan only adapt as fast as the city isopen to welcoming those types ofservices right through procurement orthrough you know direct allocation ofbudgets from a department or let’s saycity councilman’s office but the ideahere is that if citizens you know arebeing asked to stay at home and you knowfollow these ordinances which isimportant so that we can you know canfight the virus you know the citizensshould also demand from you know theirpublic officials more transparency inthe form of getting them involved in thepublic policy process and that could beby you know informing the public aboutyou know these meetings are taking placeon a daily basis or weekly basis and toproviding these available technologiesto maximize the real-time publicengagement but then you run into theissue of a digital divide right whereyou have a lot of folks in communitiesthat don’t even have access to internetright so it’s it’s a it’s a complexenvironment to operate in right whentalking about engaging the public duringa time of crisis in my case for examplewe launched a cove in nineteen supporttool that it’s a self screening tool aprice gouging and large gathering modulereporting to that is free for the publicwhy did we do that we were trying tofind a way to go through procurement butwe found that small startups dealingwith technology trying to help citieswe’re gonna have an uphill battle rightwhen introducing this type of tools orenvironments to cities and so we decidedto go ahead and give it out for free andthe response has been great it has alsohelped us you know establishrelationships with city governments thatbefore we had never talked to right andthe idea here is to also incentivizethose small and medium sized cities thatmaybe do not have access to you knowlarge technology platforms or Suitesfrom you know Oracle Motorola and so onright so as a start-up we understandthat smaller organizations such as smallcities and medium-sized cities run intoa lot of trouble right when trying topurchase this type of item so ourresponse was let’s give it out for youright and so the way we’re deploying itright is through advertisement indifferent cities in Texas and they usehas skyrocketed then what happens isthat we send emails to the governmentsabout the the use of the service and nowthey can access that the dashboard rightthat the product itself so we’ve seenhow like different methods can beapplied to this crisis when dealingright with procurement or being astart-up trying to work with governmentbut the reality is that it’s not easy isnot easy and I think you know we’regonna see more of how startups in thetechnology space working with citygovernments will find creative ways toto continue that relationship becausethings have become a little bit stagnantlike you mentioned earlier today inregards to the challenges that we’refacing with simple products such as facemask and otherof products will now imagine that thelayer of technology which is morecomplex it’s more difficult to make agovernment welcomed a technologycomponent you know without procurementor in an efficient and timely manner andthen even more you know the idea ofwhere do you find a budget when in thetime of crisis budget is of the essenceso those are some of the variables andchallenges that we face and how weovercame this challenge of working withcity government during a time of crisisthank you yeah one thing that we’ve alsoobserved at Fed OCP is just that a lotof the challenges that were already inplace are just magnified right now inthis crisis situation and someone whocan speak well to what’s happeningacross the country right now it’s Gregso Greg it does seem to be the HungerGames out there when it comes tosecuring some of the materials that weneed and everyone seems to be competingwith everyone so I’d love to get yourtake on what policy and coordinationchallenges you’ve seen and also whatstrategies you’ve seen that can help uslead to better results Thanks so yessimilar to the Hunger Games Icharacterized the current state ofprocurement and government is somethingbetween frantic and highly adaptive sortof the twin polls and we kind of heardthat from our speakers from the citiesas well today in our view you knowgovernments are having to buy thingsthey never bought before they buy themfaster than they’ve ever bought anythingbefore sometimes they’re trying toextend and repurpose existing contractsmake a decision about what’s anemergency and what’s not an emergency areal emergency and do all this whilewe’re working from home dealing withbudget shortfalls and still maintainingethics and transparency to BeddoesCommons the GPL has heard a lot recentlyabout states competing with each otherin sourcing ppl PPE but there’s actuallya lot of cooperation going on that wesee mainly at a regional level citiesand states are frequently in touch witheach other and with nationalorganizations like the nigp the NationalInstitute for governmental procurementand there were cities partners includingresults for Americasunlight foundation or ourselves just toshare tips and get ideas some of thethings we’re seeing happening right nowwe expect will end once we’re out ofthis and other things we certainly hopewill continue so we hope there’s someactually good things to pull out of thisin the endin terms of those things that expectwill end there’s been a move away fromcompetitive bidding for essential goodsand services to Michael’s point somesome of the sourcing that’s happeningjust trying to find stuff and not reallyworrying about the price or the sourceand trying to establish the service isthe legitimate or genuine source so forexample some action to deal with thisthe governor Connecticut Ned Lamontrecently exec issued an executive orderallowing for a waiver of competitivebidding in emergency situations only thecompetitive bid requirement is probablythe single most time-consuming processin procurement so it probably makessense to suspend that when you have animmediate need for PPE and their AOrestricts the waiver to Kogan relatedpurchases and they will go back tocompetitive bidding once Kogut is overso on to sort of those examples ofadjustments the government’s are makingto procurement practice that we hopewill continue one is the adjustment towork from home both for staff and forvendors procurement processes have beenheavily paper-based in many places andface to face going into the pandemic andgovernments have now been forced to moveto things like online vendor conferencesand online proposal submission no longerdo you have to drop off ten hard copiesof your proposal into a marked box andhave them you know tabbed andspiral-boundthat’s that will no longer be the caseNew Orleans had a requirement that thereare FP evaluation committee would meetto do evaluation scoring in an openpublic meeting which is great fortransparency I’d never actually seenthis anywhere else but it’s not so goodfor social distancing so a few weeks agoNew Orleans held their first onlineevaluation committee meeting in publicbut online and it went well so they’llbe doing this this way for theforeseeable futurethese kind of adaptations that get ridof outdated cumbersome practices we hopewill live on and the good permanentimprovements the procurement processand we see as repurposing of existingcontracts to adapt to the currentsituation another example from NewOrleans is the one-stop WorkforceServices vendor is now helping peoplewho are out of work to fill outapplications for unemployment insuranceand help them navigate the system and inDetroit we work with an office therethat formerly did lower income homerenovation projects they completelyshifted their efforts to help peopleapply for programs to be able to stay intheir homes so we’re seeing this kind offlexibility and adaptability happeningin many of the places we work and ittells me that in the future that statelocal governments will want to thinkmore broadly about the needs of thepeople they serve and work with vendorsand providers to figure out how to meetthose needs with more flexible andadaptable contracts our work at thegovernment performance lab generallytries to get governments to determinewhat results they want to achieve withcontracts and then design performancemeasures and senses to drive towardsthose results so we want to helpgovernments move away from just fundingactivities and toward funding outcomesand it turns out that what they’re doingin response to the crisis is actuallymoving them in this directionthey’re learning more about themarketplace some things that we neverthought we’d have to learn but certainlymoving in that direction they’recollaborating more with their serviceproviders to adapt contracts to newreality and they’re ready I think totake the next step of developingcontracts that reward innovation andresults and we’re happy to help themwith that stuff great thank you Gregalso thinking about solutions I’d loveto hear from you Marielle about the workthat you do with collaborativepurchasing and what other approachesyou’ve seen work well in this time yeahthanks so um Cobra cure helps localgovernments generally save time andtaxpayer dollars by sharing contractsand we serve a few hundred governmentsacross the United States so when westarted getting requests for help fromlocal governments looking for PPE westarted with what we knew which wascooperative contracts so as Craigmentioned like during non-emergencysituations governments typically have tobuy off of contracts creating createdexcuse me througha formal competitive bidding process andas an alternative to running a newcompetitive bidding process whichtypically takes like 4 to 24 monthsgovernments can buy from suppliers thatare already on contracts through thatother governments have created so byusing a shareable or cooperativecontract government buyers can can savetime and oftentimes also achieve costsavings through aggregated purchasingpower so our core product is a free toolthat helps governments find and buy fromthose suppliers available on cooperativecontract and we responded initially tothe PPE crisis by putting a list ofsuppliers together that were availableto sell those items that we were seeinggovernment’s needed to purchase throughexisting contracts the interesting thingwas that we realized that the problemthat we were solving for was no longercompliance so because it’s an emergencysituation the requirement to buy off ofcompetitively bid contracts has beenwaived for most agencies what werealized is that we were actuallysolving for this problem of trust assome of the other panelists havementioned especially in this momentwhich has been described as the WildWest of purchasing we are seeingextremely elevated levels of pricegouging competition counterfeit productsand fraud it’s a very chaotic situationand so it’s not surprising thatgovernment’s want to purchase fromsuppliers that other governments havealready purchased from because theytrust these suppliers more they’ve beenthrough a diligence process they’ve soldother government customers they havemore of a reputation because they’vebeen established for a long amount oftime so our initial response again ather procure was to help government sharethose suppliers that were alreadyavailable on contract but we also veryquickly experienced like this need is sogreat and many of those existingsuppliers quickly ran out of availableinventory many of them are starting tocome back online but there was a periodof a few weeks at least where the knownsuppliers that were available andtrusted had nothing or were unsure aboutwhen they would have inventory again andso we we really felt a need to supportlocal governments that we serve bystarting a source and diligence newsuppliers and so we very quickly learnedof course that actually sourcing newsuppliers isn’t hard sourcing real andnot fraudulent suppliers in other wordsdoing the diligence on the suppliers isthe really hard part and that’s becausethere’s limited time to conduct apotentially really complicated processthat in again normal times would requireboots on the ground seeing you know themanufacturers and the factories and soat on the one hand you know you have areally urgent need you have to movequickly if you want to get access toavailable inventory but on the otherhand like you’re being asked to purchasesomething that is inherently extremelyriskyso actually collaboration we foundbecomes really important here too andwhat I mean by that is not collaboratingto work together to create contracts butcollaborating together to to build trustand do that diligence process faster sowe’ve seen that local governments havebeen sharing the suppliers that they’reworking with so that other governmentscan fast-track their diligence andvetting process and what we’ve the rolethat we’ve played during this time onCobra cure is essentially helping tocollect and record those purchasingexperiences and then elevate newsuppliers that have successfully servedlocal governments before and have averified buyer reference to a listessentially of more vetted and trustedsuppliers you know I think it’s clearthat we need more collaboration we needto be buying together not just at thelocal government level but at thefederal level to compete on this Googlemarket for masks and other items andunfortunately in the absence of acoordinated federal response we’ve youknow we’ve seen some collaborationactivity like States you know Californiafor instance stepping up to purchasematerials and even sending some of thosematerials to other states and we haveseen some regional organizations likeone of our partners in the Kansas Citymetro area the mid-america RegionalCouncil leading regional efforts tosource PPE and aggregating thesepotentially smaller orders that wouldn’totherwise be able to get outto legit PPE supply together socollaboration is happening andpurchasing but not enough and once againat the local government level I thinkwe’ve seen coordination collaborationinvolving working together on diligenceand helping peer agencies navigate theWild West of of PPE purchasing and Ithink overall we’ve been reallyencouraged by how many local agencieshave provided feedback about suppliersto enable governments other governmentsto progress faster and with a higherlevel of trust during this this time ofneedgreat thank you Marielle sky so youstarted in your introduction to talk tous about some of the challenges that oursmall and medium businesses have had andwe’d love to hear more about what theseSMEs can do and what local governmentscan do to help make it through thiscrisis since they have been so hard hitand will be so important as part of ourrecovery efforts yes thank youdefinitely very important to help smallbusinesses now more than ever so firstand foremost I want to say that I reallysympathize with our government agencyprocurement professionals right now Iknow it is not easy the things thatMichael and Jennifer have sharedwe’ve been talking to lots ofprocurement some executives are allacross the country both on the privateand in public sector and it is a hardtime especially when you’re in theimmediate crisis situation right and andMichael and I have talked about thisseveral times before but if I want totake a step back for a second becauseyes technology can help I think what weneed is a shift in mentality thementality of government procurement andbado mentioned this as well governmentprocurement has always been historicallya very offline very in-person processthat’s really designed more for largecompanies it is that no one ever accusedsi P or Oracle on being a user-friendlysystem but those are the systems thatare most often used and right now weneed innovation we need a new way ofthinking we need to come together asMary was mentioning to be able to dothis in a centralized effort and that’snot how the system is instead of rightnow I’m really hoping that now thatwe’re starting hopefully starting tomove out of that immediate panicsituation into how do we think aboutmaking changes for the long term to helpbenefit things we can we can reallyassess the fact that we need morecentralized systems across the board andwe need to make things easier I knowthat the tendency is to go after peopleto go after suppliersyou have worked with for a long timebefore but we’ve talked about this onthis call you can’t always use the samepeople over and over again and by theway most of those home suppliers are notminority and women-owned businessesbecause it’s traditionally very hard forthem people who are getting hardest inthis in this Kovach crisis areminorities both from the healthperspective and from a financialperspective yet there there’s a ton ofinnovation that’s happening in thisspaceand we know several small businesseseven in the LA area who have said wewant to help we can repurpose oursystems to be able to make things thatpeople need right now to be able to makePPE and supply those but where do we gowho do we go to so on the one hand whilethe the traditional mentality is let’smake this easier so let’s create anotherwebsite for people to go to that is justa little bit 19 related in focus and canbypass some of these long lengthyprocesses it actually can exacerbate theproblem because if you have every agencythen already having their traditional nowebsites and paths and then on top ofthat now we have these new Comid-nineteen different websites andpaths and there’s no coordination amongthem it’s mass confusion and mass chaosand me the impetus is on moving quicklybecause small businesses are dying outby the hundreds and thousands right nowwe’ve been beating this drum for thepast three and a half years but it hasnever been more evident than it is rightnow that small businesses are thebackbone of this economy make up half ofall employment and we’re seeing thisright now I know we’re talking aboutlocal local governments but I have toshare this out with you because it wasjust so mind-boggling for me that theSBA received over 44 million loanapplications from small businesses thereare 30 point 2 million small businessesin the United States ok so when I talkto them I said well how do we have thiswell what’s the issue and they said wellnumber one the biggest issue is thatthere is when you apply for a loanthrough the SBA you don’t receive anemail saying that your application wasreceived so first and foremost peopledon’t even know if their application canreceive so now they’re just we havein multiple places right but butsecondly no one knows there’s nocommunication there’s no transparency asvidoes mentioning and no status updatesor anything so you don’t know if whereyou are in the queue if they’re gonnaget to you money is running out etc somillions of small businesses will notmake it and though it is really hardand people are pulling back on theirprocurement budgets we have to find away to work with more small and minorityand women-owned businesses because thisis the crux of the economy and I thinkit’s the best way to do that is tocentralize efforts and make the processeasier for everyoneperiod and that’s really what we’ve doneand what we focus on and a bazaar isjust a centralized procurement andsourcing process where you have thatlinked in for the supply chain so youhave that centralized aggregated oneplace to find and vet suppliers and thenhave your procurement your RFP processand an RFP process I think I hope we aredone with the days of 375 page partiesright can I just put it out there rightnow like that needs to end because we’veseen that we can get things done so muchfast they’re so much more efficient ifwe don’t have that in the vetting youknow we’ve heard people say well if youdon’t have those long RFPs you know wecan’t get through the vetting processthese are two different things these aretwo different things one thing is whatis the need let’s focus on the need andhave needs-based procurements and agileprocurement methodology and the othercomponent is betting so while there’sthere are some things that smallbusinesses can do I’m to better fromyour familiarize themselves withdifferent processes I really think thethe biggest thing that will help is tobe able to centralized governmentsystems a habbit coordinated to make ituser-friendly and just to make it easierso that we can get through procurementand it doesn’t take ya six months to ayear for every procurement processthat’s astrong strong message to end on andbefore we go to our open conversation Ihave one final question for ourpanelists and that’s if you could answerin one sentence as we emerge from thesereally challenging times what are thelessons that you hope that the people onthis call will take away from ourcurrent experience to improve ourrecovery efforts as you move ahead andwe can start with NATO governments tendto be reactive not proactive these timeshave really changed the way thatgovernments are adapting to differenttrends and with that I think comes thisresponsibility right from the privatesector or small businesses or startupsto support governments in this trial youknow in their period and the way thatlooks like is by you know launchinginitiatives or pilots that can supportgovernments in addressing and you knowfighting this type of viruses like Ovidbecause I think you know as we see onthe news and we read more of these thesecrisis may become prolonged and we mayhave waves of these virus right so thequestion is as government will continueto adapt what is the private sector whatare small businesses and startups goingto do to support these governments inthe next wave or situations where we’regonna find challenges regards to healthgreat thank you and JenniferyouI guess if I’m limited to one sentientaspiration I think Michael Oh may agreeI think digital procurement is just morecritical than ever I mean it touchesupon when everybody said if you have acentralized I think sky was talkingabout centralized I was taking notes asfolks were talking this guy’s talkingabout centralized Greg’s talking abouteliminating paper and duplicativepractices thanos talking abouttransparency Mariel is talking aboutsourcing if you have a digitalend-to-end system that is managing thewhole process that is providingtransparency for all that’s collectingdata and information how critical isdata and information to responding tothis crisis knowing who’s on thefrontlines knowing who their clients areknowing how many people are being servedknowing where to get your PPE I mean allof that is data that could be stored ina central system and utilized inemergencies like this so I think the onetakeaway is cities need to really getmoving on digital procurement and as Imentioned before Michael and Dan Simonat mocs were really leaders in thisspace certainly for the city of New Yorkwhich is you know one of the largest Ithink we are the largest in the in thecountry in really moving to a digitalplatform to touch all of these goalsthat are all critical in an emergencysituation and also in an everydaysituation great thank you and sky whatare your thoughts while it is criticalto go digital and have digital systems Idon’t think it’s enough I think it hasto be digital user-friendly systems thatmake it easier for both participants touse I mean the amount of times that Ihave edge I personally educated thegovernment of procurement staff on theirown government procurement processes tobe able to accomplish their goals is usdownso yes digitization user-friendly andcentralization is extremely importantand everyone needs to be focused on howdo we do that prevent to prevent thisfrom happening again thank youand Michael yes I would just echo whateveryone else said the one thing that Iwould add is I think in a situation likethis shows you what we are capable of ifwe have to act quickly that I think wehave to be critical about just becausewe can act quickly doesn’t mean that weshould get rid of all of the controlsthat we have in place or the vettingthat we have in place that we need to dobut as you scale up and and go digitalyou should also think about just whatkind of what processes don’t need toexist right because you have that levelof transparency on that level processand you know I think transparencyvisibility all of that is good but italso doesn’t work if you don’t have thetalent and the people who are able andwilling to to actually implement andmake it work and I think that’s that’s afar bigger challenge for all of us thatwe have to invest in thank you Marioyeah I mean I think we do have an havealways had really big common challengesand we tend to handle them at the localgovernment level in a fairly fragmentedway and so we really do need to buildprocurement collaboration muscles forfaster and more effective and inclusiverecovery and I think a lot of that goesback to you know open free availabledata for governments to be able to shareon board suppliers including smallbusinesses when are your own and womenand businesses and essentially like notrepeat and reinvent the wheel everysingle time but to elevate up and bubbleup the things that are working and thegood work that is being done becauseit’s legally possible to share it andthe technology exists it just has notbeen applied in in this domain as muchas it could be so I think thiscollaboration infrastructure and it’ssomething we’re working to build ATCOprocure will be even more essentialduring the recovery than ever beforethank you and Greg you the final wordthanks Kay so I think this is somethingthat Jennifer touched on but werecognized more than ever I thinkthrough this experience that weco-create government services withprivate and nonprofit sectors and so wego back to our lessons learned generallyunderstand the marketplace and engagewith providers collaborate with serviceproviders in an equitable way andshaping what your what your purchasingand develop contracts that rewardinnovation and results great thank youso we’d hoped to reserve some time forall of you here on the call tocontribute your thoughts and your ideasand your questions I am glad to see thatmany of you have already been having alively chat but now is your moment toadd your voices as wellso if you would like to say somethingplease leave a message in the chat OhRory would you like to unmute yourselfan industrial question directly to folksyouhi my name is Jerry McDonald I work withthe University of Oxford’s governmentoutcomes lab we are thinking about howsocial services are changing and how thesocial services and outcomes aroundsocial services need to exchange andadjust and flex but I have a questionthat is more directly related to what Iheardjust now and the question related youknow is are you capturing and sharinginformation about a performance andquality it strikes me is relatively easyto share information about the entityname contract award or price is paid butyou’ve all talked about the importanceof trust how do you digitize trust yeahI can I can start with that so with abetter platform with avasara we have ashared collaborative infrastructure thatallows everyone on meeting multiplegovernment agencies and jurisdictions toshare access to one network of vendorswhich is a centralized ever-growingnetwork and each agency can includetheir own notes about that that vendorand their experiences with that vendorand which we wanted to share acrossagencies the difference is the issue isthat legally a lot of different agenciesare not allowed to share thatinformation with each otherand sometimes not even within otherdepartments within the same organizationso that has been a challenge andcontinues to be a challenge it issomething that we are actively workingon but that’s that’s one of the bigreasons why it hasn’t just existedeverywhere right now because becauselegally you can’t do that and that issuch a great question if anyone from thepanel or others on the call would liketo contribute feel free to unmuteyourselves and and let us know yourthoughts yeah I would just say this is ahuge thing that’s missing in procurementin general is like we spend so much timeand effort getting through thecontracting process and then and I’msure Greg can share a ton more but it’slike and then what happens you know wehad a contractthat existed we had a supplier that didsome work but what were the results whatwere the outcomes that part is so oftenunfortunately missing from the contractmanagement you know process and cycleand it typically you know to myknowledge and in my experience it isn’tcollected in a very standardized processor shared publicly and asked I mentionedthere are some challenges around how doyou design that work and how do youshare it from a legal perspective it’sbeen fascinating I think by necessitykoper curious found ourselves likeasking for feedback basically just in amore binary right around like is thesupplier real and did the stuff that youordered arrived like on time did it meetyour quality expectations etc so it’s avery it’s a very simple rubric for nowand it’s simpler obviously to whenyou’re talking about like commodities orit’s like did it show up was the productlegit it’s much harder and morecomplicated and again I’m sure Gregg hasa lot of experience here but to evaluateservices in part because the way we askor have asked for things occasionally ingovernment as well doesn’t always set upthe relationship for success so it’stricky and it’s really needed and I hopeyou know we have as we think aboutthings that we’re taking in to this kindof new normal that we’re establishingyou know that’s one of the things Ithink I’m excited about where we aregetting more feedback from from buyersand seeing governments sharing thatexperience more and more again just oncommodities for now but we’ll see howthat changes ingress I’m sorry I justwanted up services I’m and Brian andMuriel I’d say this applies to socialservices but equally to technologyservices and capital projects those kindof things we go so far as to say that inyour RFP and this helps with thelegality of it you should indicate thatif you’re as successful and win thecontract under that we’re going to doregular performance checks and thatinformation could be used in makingfuture procurement decisions within amunicipality or that state but wehaven’t gone so far as to say that thatdata which is going to be kind of uniqueto that city or state could be sharedwith otherand I think that the consistency of itthere’s there’s a lot of issues with youknow the you know whether thatsubjective data or subject to data andbut we put it up front than the RFP sothat at least we feel generally as alegal basis for collecting it and usingit focusing government Oh Jennifer I wasjust in the city of New York performanceevaluations are part of the standardpractice contract management I there’scertainly room for improvement but as abasic activity it’s required for all ofour human service contracts and then youknow for goods you have other ways ofevaluating etc but for our servicesperformance evaluations are part of theregular practice they’re also actuallydigitized through our passport platformthey’re actually managed in passportthey’re available for other agencies tolook at when they’re makingdeterminations around a vendorsresponsibility level of responsibilityfor an award and a contract so we haveit centralized and there’s alsoopportunities in our legislation andregulations for general access toperformance evaluation so on the verysort of basic level we have it we’reusing it and thinking about how we canmake them stronger as well hi my name isJudy save you and I’m actually callingfrom Bermuda but I’m on the board ofsomething called a vision spring andsome of you may be familiar with it it’swon a lot of awards they normallyprovide eyeglasses to the basically tothe developing world to the masses forthe first time ever we’re looking atrepurposing our contacts in producingeyewear to making goggles face masksprotective shields etc and focusing onthe US market for the first time so theone of the reasons I’m gonna ask themkronfeld one of the reasons I was veryinterested in this call was to figureout we don’t really have a system foroffering what we normally offer toplaces like India or Ghana for the USthe particular urban us when we see allthese obvious problems so one of thethings I wanted to ask is how would anorganization likebring the does six million dollars worthof work a year how might it access orfind out where is the greatest need forthings like the PPE that we can accessfrom our various sources so it gets tothe the most underserved places ataffordable prices so we’re we haveproducts we want to get it to the rightplaces and find an efficient way ofdoing that helping the neediest first atan affordable price any ideas of how toefficiently do that quickly thank youthe city of New York has a centralizedsourcing webpage so I can I can sendthat along here the link to that butMoxa’s worked with the city to set up aspace for folks and businesses likeyourself to be able to submitinformation about goods and servicesthat are available for the köppen reliefso I can send that to everybody on thechat box Jennifer does that mean doesthat say any and the county and theTransit Authority and the othersurrounding agencies I’m sorry what’syour questiondoes that say if you’re mentioning isthat encompass the county and theTransit Authority and the other agencieswithin the the greater area it’s for thecity of New York and if you’re familiarwith the city of New York we have likeour mayoral agencies and then we havethe agencies that are like hybrids likenature’s like that do we is like thatI’m not sure I my instinct is that it’scovering all of those agencies as wellbut don’t don’t quote me on that butcertainly you’re gonna be covering atleast the 40 mayoral and it’s going intoa centralized hub that is then you knowtaking the next steps with those leavesand where where the need is the greatestand and figuring out how to move productand services along so mythe neural response would be go ifyou’re interested in making yourselfknown just submit and then you know takeit from there and see where that goesgreat and those of you who have otherthoughts feel free to follow up directlywith students she’s put her contactinformation there I know that Dustin hada question and I think it’sunfortunately we were running out oftime I think this is a good one for usto end on yeah and I’ll and the topicmay lead to another panel or some suchso so I’m just linear I’m a formerprocurement officer and we work withprocurement shops around the countrywe’re currently doing new normal designexercises with several public entitiesincluding a major city and the theconcept on that is that we’re not goingback to where we were because there’s noback right where we are in the responseis going to continue and so there’sthings about the procurementorganization that we’ve put on holdwhile we’re dealing with this there’sgoing to still need to be really in putso I’m curious from the entities thatare doing the government side like theNew York and the LA like how are youboth dealing with the current and thenplanning to bring everything else thatyou’ve been doing that you’ve beenhaving to put on hold so that doesn’tbecome the next crisis has that beenpart of your thought process and how areyou how are you trying to address thatMichael you want to go first or sureso yeah the so the county we have somelevel of technical functionality toprovide for online sourcing onlinecontract management online digitalsignatures it’s not I mean frankly it’snot coherent and it’s not built in a waythat allows for easy reporting and it’snot in a place where I want it and sothat was part of my goal I’ve only beenhere for about a year and so part ofthis past year was socializing everyoneand also developing a strategic plan forour next three years which included atransformation a digitalas well as a process one that obviouslytakes resources and it’s unclear rightnow whether or not I’m gonna have theresources to be able to do that so wemight just have to use some belts insuspenders approach in the near termwhile we you know while we figure outwhat our path going forward it’s gonnabe that’s that’s really the the sort ofhigh level answer I do want to stress soyou know when you talk about procurementand we we’ve we touched on this a littlebit is we I think focus a lot on thesourcing right on the competitiveelements and or finding the vendor andgoing to an RFP process we I think GPLdoes a really great job of focusing onthe other important elements likecontract management which I thinkfrankly will be a lot harder to do inthe new normal if we’re not gonna beable to go send people or people don’tfeel comfortable going out into thefield if we have to socially distance ifwe you know there’s a lot of stuff thatI think that as we’ve as we thinkthrough what the 18 what the next 18 to24 months is gonna be like it it’s veryclosely connected to how we as a countryin the world are gonna respond to thisglobal pandemic right it’s not somethingthat even we’re not guaranteed a vaccineso how are we gonna actually keep try tokeep things at this at this at leastworkable level and if it’s gonna haveworkforce implications its that willthat will sort of flow down to where weare today right and so I think that’sgoing to be really challenging for usyeah so how do we maintain I think yourquestion is how do you maintain theregular work while you’re responding toa crisis situation we machs we have theresources we began building a digitalsystem a couple years ago so we have theresources in place we have a quite a bigteam now in place and sooh we’re able to you know in positionourselves internally to new sorts ofteams that work on responding every dayevery hour to the twists and turns ofkovin 19 while still ensuring that wehave folks around and available to keepbuilding out digital procurement we’regoing live with a third major release ofour platform in the next couple ofmonths and that will bring allsignatures online and remove notaries asMichael had mentioned it’s just so muchmore than just the store saying it’sgonna take the whole process from endand online so we continue to build we’recreating new ways of testing we used tobring vendors and agencies into mocks toactually get into the system and try tobreak it we can’t do that now it’s anit’s much more complicated to just sharescreens when you’re in a testingenvironment so thinking of new ways todo that but yeah moving forward becauseas we can see now more than evertransformation to our procurementpractice is essential so we have to keepour eyes on on that road thank you somuch and I can’t imagine better wordsfor us to end onso with that over to Jennifer forclosing commentsyeah um first of all I’m just delightedum how many folks have remained on thecall particularly Michael and Jenniferthank you so much for taking this timeto share your resources and also Michaelparticularly giving us insight about thestresses that you’re under I just wantto honor what all of you are goingthrough and all of you who are on thecall who are doing this frontlineday-to-day procurement this you knowpeople laugh about oh procurement godthat’s so boring it’s essential it’slife-saving right this is a big part ofwhat government does and so it’s reallykind of an honor to be able to spotlightand support that work particularly nowI’m a couple things that Ireally struck me on the call is thisnotion of solving for trust as we goforward what are the new ways that we’regoing to use to solve for trust if youlook at the development of procurementsystems previously the way we solved fortrust was a lot of rules and a lot oflawyers I’m trained as a lawyer I cansay stuff like that are there new fastermore flexible more accessible moreinclusive ways to solve for trusts howdo we how do we solve that problem usingnew technology tools and this also thisnotion of a shift in mentality if we cancreate faster and more flexibleprocesses imperfect ones but faster moreflexible processes for equipment that’sliterally life and death presumablythere is a little bit more flexibilityand experimentation in the system forsome of the run-of-the-mill supplies andservices that governments do so I thinkthis can open up the thinking andperhaps give city and state and countyleaders right the county executives themayor’s really a powerful impetus tomake procurement change andaccessibility more visible and perhaps apriority in for their administration andwe have all of these entities who youknow have been on the call who are partof OCP who are in the Aspen Network whocan help so I really look forward tothinking about what we can do togetherthrough this crisis and then as we startto rebuild what a procurement systemmight look like again that can be fasteffective efficient and equitable sothat the people who are supplying ourcities are as diverse and wonderful andamazing as the people who are living inand leading our cities so thanks so muchfor your time and thoughts for today
Go digital
To replenish their vendor pool, local governments could look to smaller businesses, many of whom are seeking to redirect their usual operations to meet the demands of the crisis. User-friendly, online procurement processes would lower the barriers to entry for small firms, including small minority- and women-owned businesses, to access opportunities. Moving away from opaque and time-intensive processes make it easier for governments to move fast, too.
“Digital procurement is more critical than ever…Cities need to get moving,” remarked Jennifer Geiling, Deputy Director for Policy and Partnerships, New York City Mayor’s Office of Contract Services. “If you have a digital end-to-end system that is managing the whole process and provides transparency for all, you’ll be able to touch all of the goals that are critical in an emergency situation and also in an everyday situation.”
welcome to everyone my name is Kay I amfrom open contracting partnership andfor those of you who are less familiarwith open contracting partnership we area nonprofit that works in the UnitedStates and abroad to make publiccontracting more efficient open anddeliver better results for everyone wework with governments civil society andthe private sector and as we’ve beensupporting our partners over these lastfew weeks on emergency procurement we’velearned just how important the role ofopen and efficient procurement is forhelping to manage this crisis and whenwe came together in Aspen it was soclear to us that there was an urgentneed for a space for a conversation withmembers from across the procurementecosystem about how we are respondingfor code to cope at 19 and every dayit’s more apparent that the fiscalimpact of coab at 19 is unprecedented inthese times we really must make the mostout of our limited public money that wehave to effectively fight the virusprotect our populations as well as veryimportantly to rebuild our economy weare very eager to hear from our amazingselection of panelists and all of youabout the challenges that you’reexperiencing and the practices that arehelping you to get better resultsespecially around open data transparencyand collaboration quick overview of ouragenda the first half of our call willbe a discussion with our chart ofpanelists and then we’re going to try tohold back at least 20 minutes for anopen conversation with all of you thisis not a webinar we really intend forthis to be an open space for us to havea conversation and collaborate we feelthat there are so many great people onthe call today and we want to make surethat we hear your voices and all thatyou have to share and contribute soquick ground rules we know that there’sa lot of people on the call today so weask that you follow our guidance to makesure that it’s a welcome and safe spacefor everyone we invite you to make agenerous use of the chat function andthe sidebars youget your comments in and questions wealso would love it if you wouldcontribute to the document which we’vebeen sharing around earlier with ournotes and and when the time comes to askour panelists questions I’ll be keepingtrack of who is asking what and duringthe open conversation I will be makingsure that I am met and we are callingpeople in the order that they volunteerwe also ask that you keep your commentsand questions brief given just how manypeople are in our call todaysavvy everyone has a chance and lastlyas as is our new reality since we’re onsoon please keep yourself on you if youare not talking now that all thathousekeeping is out of the wayI am honored to introduce you toJennifer Bradley the founding directorof the Aspen Institute for the Centerfor urban innovation who will set outthe framework context for the call todaythanks so much kay I really appreciatethe opportunity to be here I’m extremelygrateful to all of our panelists whohave made the time in this incrediblybusy and urgent period that we’re livingin to talk about the importance ofprocurement the Center for urbaninnovation works with leaders in citygovernment nonprofits philanthropies andthe private sector to make sure thatlocal innovation agendas are alignedwith inclusion and equity imperatives wewere drawn to procurement as a topicbecause procurement is essential to bothinnovation and equity and procurement isparticularly in the spotlight these daysand under great pressure as citygovernments are working very hard to getthe emergency equipment that we needwe’re so glad to work with OCT on thiscall to help folks understand whatresponses are working now to getessential supplies and servicesdelivered and we also want to understandwhere responses are falling short andhow to close the gap particularly onquestions of equity often I think theapproach that that many people have toequity is that it’s something that youcan do in good timebut in case of emergency it’s all aboutsort of efficiency and power purchasingbut particularly given that equityimplications of who’s being hit hardestby Kovac 19 both economically and in ahealth perspective we understand thatequity can’t wait equity has to be apart of everything so I’m particularlyinterested in hearing how governmentsare trying to make sure that theyfulfill their equity commitments duringthis emergency time and finally we wantto learn about what the emergency isteaching us that can guide how localgovernments buy services and suppliesduring the recovery and afterwards canthis crisis cede lessons for localgovernments and the larger ecosystem ofsmall business and procurement to bemore flexible more transparent morecollaborative and more equitable so I’mextremely excited for this discussiontoday and we’ll turn it back over to Kaygreat Thank You Jennifer now we reallydo have a terrific group of paneliststoday so I’m going to ask you tointroduce yourselves and let us knowwhat you have been doing to keep seeingduring these crazy times and let’s getstarted with you better hey everyone myname is Betty Medina I’m the CEO andco-founder at iris we buildcollaborative platforms to engage thepublic from we have the government toResidence what am i doing to stay sane Ibought this peloton before this crisisand it was the best purchase that I madeso far I’m writing that thing every dayso that’s keeping me sane wonderful andJennifer from New York City hi goodafternoon thanks for inviting the cityof New York happy to be here torepresent us I’m from the mayor’s officeof contract services and our officeoversees about 20 billion dollars worthof annual procurement that’s across 40city agencies we have a team of over6,000 procurement staff across the citywe have 15,000 vendors and slightly morethan that actually who are registered todo business with the cityso the scope of our work is quite broadand we are currently pursuing technologyinitiatives to digitize procurementacross the city of New Yorkwhile we are also supporting the city inour kovat relief response I amparticular oversee policy andpartnerships inside mosques and thatmeans that I’m working to cultivaterelationships with our vendorcommunities as Jennifer flagged equitybeing a particular interest we spend alot of time working with mwbes as wellas human service nonprofits which we’llget to I think in a little bit when westart talking about our response interms of what keeps me sane honestly thework is tremendous right now having thethe perspective that we have in the cityhaving a structure having so much to doevery day helps to keep me keep memotivated keep us motivated keep usmoving a glass of wine often helps and Iagree with beta that peloton especiallytheir new online apps are welcomedistraction great and Jennifer is Danjoining us today or not yeah I thinkit’s just nice to on the phonemmm all right so in that case it is overto Skye hi everyone Skye Kelley founderand CEO of a bazaar we are a procurementsourcing vendor registration and acertification platform all combined intoone like a LinkedIn for the supply chainwith a special emphasis on helping smallbusinesses I’m especially minority andwomen-owned businesses contract withgovernments at the local level and afederal you did this again as thatLinkedIn for the supply chain so what’skeeping me saying these days it’s hardto say saying it really is let me justput that out there I think one of thethings that’s helping is that we reallyyou are we are able to help our localgovernments able to go online anddigitized in a time and fashion and veryquickly when they need it most we areable to help small businesses which asall of you know small businesses arereally suffering right now especiallyminority and women-owned businesses theyare suffering the most and so being ableto provide that both that voice both atthe local level and assistance as wellas now at the federal level being ableto share the experiences of our smallbusinesses and advocate on behalf ofthem and make sure that we are movinginto this new era is really helpingoutside of that I don’t have a peloton Iactually hate exercise bikes it’s justit doesn’t work for me but I havestarted to do online workout classes inthe last couple of days I’m gonna behonest not before then so that is that’swhat’s helping that’s helping great andMichael Angelo’s here yes I’m here sorryI am sorry I’ve been a little bit crazythis morning so am I just supposed tointroduce myself just enjoy yourself yepkeep going and then I’m such a zoomNewby I’m terrible at this sorry my nameis Michael oh I’m the purchasing agentand general manager for the internalservices department for the County ofLos Angeles I have only been with thecounty for about a year I am NOT sayingright now so I’m not doing anything tokeep myself saying and very happy to beinteracting with OCP and Jennifer who isthe best facilitator I’ve ever seen inaction sky a good friend and all of youand Jennifer who I love who I hired andone day will hire me and thank you forinviting me well that’s it that’s anintrowe are also very excited to have all ofyou with us really is it a wonderfulpanel and our next terrific panelist isMario everyone I’m Mario Reed I’m aformer public servant and co-founder ofcopra care we’re a mission drivenstartup that supports more transparentefficient and inclusive publicprocurement especially focused at thelocal level and we do that by helpinglocal governments find and sharecontracts across the country yeah Ithink everyone sanity has become arelative thing I agree with the winehappening oftentimes a little bitearlier in the evening but yeah myhusband and I got a puppy back inJanuary which feels like years ago andhe’s been a huge source of entertainmentfor us those and a good excuse also toget outside for some socially distancefresh air and exercise he’s also madesome guest appearances on our zoom teammeetings on Cobra cure so he’soccasionally chimes in there as wellhe’s welcome to contribute to thismeeting as well if that happens Gregyou’re the last one hi I’m Greg wass andwith the government performance lab atthe Harvard Kennedy School the GPLconducts research and provides technicalassistance to state and localgovernments and how they can improve theresults that they achieve for theirconstituents particularly throughcontracting I want to shout out to OscarHernandez who’s in the audience herefrom OCP for inviting me to join today’spanel thanks Oscar good to see you andlet’s see to stay sane I guess I’dbecome a bit of a farmer we’ve beengrowing our own sprouts and we kind of asprout starter and we just planted somedill outside got some good weather it’svery cool so we do miss people but we’recommuning with our plants here that’sgreat so now that we’ve talked about allthe things that are keeping us sane I’mafraid we’re gonna have to go back intothe craziness that is our currentreality and I think that no one isbetter prepared to speak about just thechallengeand the real craziness of these timesthen Jennifer is based in New York Cityso Jennifer my first question is for youwe would really love to hear about youron the ground perspective I’m sure thatwe could talk a whole hour about thisreallybut yeah we’re just working on andseeing in New York City yeah for sureum I guess there’s a few ways ofthinking about it there’s the nuts andbolts challenges in the weeds technicalpieces such as sourcing PPE I mean we’reall familiar with the hourly newsbroadcasts around our blog howeveryou’re catching your information aroundthe struggles with sourcing ventilatorstesting now so across the board that’sbeen challenging we experienced it evenin the most sort of basic way and justtrying to get masks and gloves justacross the the world really folks arestretched on trying to get thoseresources so you have some of thattechnical challenges that you’re seeingevery day on the ground and trying to becreative and trying to move quicklybecause lives literally depends on itand then there are some sort of biggerstructural challenges that are changingand surfacing every day one is theeconomic financial challenges that we’refacing there’s a loss in tax revenuethere’s high unemployment how do youdetermine which services to maintainwhich services to modify which ones needto be cut in the city of New York asit’s true for many of the cities acrossthe country human services are deliveredby nonprofits but they’re essentially abranch of the government and so how doyou ensure that you maintain thoseservices you maintain thoseorganizations they’re important now andthey’re going to be important when weget through this period of time andmoving forward so how do you think aboutthat given the economic climate and theother piece that is sort of a challengeand one that we’re trying we always tryto grapple with and we’re coming up withnew ways of addressing it here iscommunication so how do you make surethat you’re communicating with yourvendors how do you make sure that you’reopening up lines of communication withsuppliers how do youyou create across city agencies how doyou communicate within City Hallfiguring it out there are creative waysfolks are moving we’ve we arerepositioning internally in order torespond to the crisis so understandingwho to talk to how to talk to them howto get them into a virtual room and withproviders we’re doing that through acentralized teamit’s the c19 HHS response team it is agroup of folks from mocksfrom our Office of Management and Budgetfrom City Hall teams deputy mayor teamswho come together to look at the sectoracross issue areas and create guidanceand information and channels forcommunication so that we can shareimmediately when we know things areshifting we can hear immediately fromthem when they need support it’s hard todeliver bad news there’s a lot of badnews being delivered but it has to bedelivered and we have to try to worktogether to figure out how to getthrough ityouthank you that I and from I think onbehalf of everyone on the call we wishyou the best as you confront this crisisMichael we’d love to also get theon-the-ground story in LA Countysorry I’m still trying to figurethis works so yes I think Jennifer hiton all of the big issues that we’re alsofacing we I actually just recently hadto initiate a purchasing freeze acrossacross the county we have a spendingfreeze as well we everything that we’vebeen doing in terms of the response tokovat has been extremely expensive andunlike you know the federal governmentor unlike even New York City we don’thave an our budgets only about thirtyfour billion which seems like a lotexcept it’s not the the on-the-groundstuff is interesting maybe I’ll go sinceJennifer hit like sort of the high-levelpieces which I think are very importantfor people to understand the I’ll go alittle bit a level below which is thatin LA I think this is the urgency andthe the level of sort of stress andintensity is something that I don’tthink anyone on my team or anyone thatI’ve spoken to across the region interms of the sourcing and procurement ofthese necessary PPEsor any anything else that we need interms of the response has been like noone’s no one’s ever experienced anythinglike this and I know New York inparticular has experienced it like ahundredfold right we’ve been lucky herewe are this is our second week of whatwas expected to be our peak and ourprojected deaths are lower now than theywere even three weeks ago were at arelatively decent Hospital capacity forICU beds as well as emergency room bedsand overall capacity but we did like itjust a couple weeks ago and if I if youcatch me looking down on my phone evennow we’re still at like that sort ofurgent critical level for certain typesof PPE there was a week where it wasactually easier for me to get forprivate planes willing to go pick uprespirators from China than it was forme to find legitrespirators right you go down all ofthese rabbit holes that take hours daysto figure out and you’re still I meanyou know and they come back with nothingI was on the phone with three M’s GlobalRisk team yesterday describing one ofthe rabbit holes that I went under andthey were telling me look we don’t haveany supply we don’t have this wouldprobably be good for people to know theydon’t have they don’t sell in Europe soif someone’s telling you that they’relike they have a cache of 3m 1860’s inEurope they don’t have that they don’tsell in Europe because of the regulatorystuff if someone from like the the lotconformant conformance documents are allproperly fake you know just I think onthe one hand you’re seeing the best inpeople and then on the other hand you’realso seeing the worst in people sothat’s what you’re seeing on the groundand I think it’s in some ways it’samazing because you know you know thatthe work that you’re doing which wasalways good which is always related tothe public good was making a differencebut now it’s potentially really savinglives on a daily basis so that’s reallygreat but that’s also like kind ofstressful for people and so if you can’tget something it’s really tragic andthen you’re feeling very desperate allthe time right and so I know somejurisdictions have been prepayingor you know doing the deposits or doingescrows as necessary we have not donethat because I’ve been we’ve been luckywe haven’t had to do that but also Ithink dan from New York came up withthis term but this gray market sourcingyou guys we just all have to be verycareful about it and so I’ll stop therebecause I think that gives you a littlebit of flavor of what we’re dealing withyeah and it’s true and it’s just aflavor what we’re dealing with and Ithink we’re going to talk more aboutsome of those challenges that youhighlighted for us as we continue thisconversationso speaking of challengesBantam I know that you have a backgroundand thinking about transparency andcommunity and engagement and these areboth certainly crucial factors right nowas you respond to this crisis butunfortunately transparency and communityengagementalso some of the first approaches thatgovernments can drop it at these times Ilove to hear about what you see is someof the main challenges right nowespecially in regards to these factorsyeah definitely so I think you knowtransparency in public access during atime of crisis is important andnecessary you know for the clarity intolike government decision-makingprocesses and it gives you know thepublic better reassurance about what thegovernment is doing right but it’s easyto drop like you mentioned right so wemust find flexible ways and resilientways to you know engage a residents in ameaningful conversation beyond just thecurrent crisis right is to give themaccess so the number one challenge rightis that all the the efforts that makeour cities thrive right such as townhalls public involvement efforts thatinclude large gatherings of crowds todaymake our cities vulnerable right tospread in the virus so how do we respondto that that’s the question right and sowe’re seeing how technology can help ussuch as having this panel virtuallyright but at the same time in thetechnology industry which I operate incan only adapt as fast as the city isopen to welcoming those types ofservices right through procurement orthrough you know direct allocation ofbudgets from a department or let’s saycity councilman’s office but the ideahere is that if citizens you know arebeing asked to stay at home and you knowfollow these ordinances which isimportant so that we can you know canfight the virus you know the citizensshould also demand from you know theirpublic officials more transparency inthe form of getting them involved in thepublic policy process and that could beby you know informing the public aboutyou know these meetings are taking placeon a daily basis or weekly basis and toproviding these available technologiesto maximize the real-time publicengagement but then you run into theissue of a digital divide right whereyou have a lot of folks in communitiesthat don’t even have access to internetright so it’s it’s a it’s a complexenvironment to operate in right whentalking about engaging the public duringa time of crisis in my case for examplewe launched a cove in nineteen supporttool that it’s a self screening tool aprice gouging and large gathering modulereporting to that is free for the publicwhy did we do that we were trying tofind a way to go through procurement butwe found that small startups dealingwith technology trying to help citieswe’re gonna have an uphill battle rightwhen introducing this type of tools orenvironments to cities and so we decidedto go ahead and give it out for free andthe response has been great it has alsohelped us you know establishrelationships with city governments thatbefore we had never talked to right andthe idea here is to also incentivizethose small and medium sized cities thatmaybe do not have access to you knowlarge technology platforms or Suitesfrom you know Oracle Motorola and so onright so as a start-up we understandthat smaller organizations such as smallcities and medium-sized cities run intoa lot of trouble right when trying topurchase this type of item so ourresponse was let’s give it out for youright and so the way we’re deploying itright is through advertisement indifferent cities in Texas and they usehas skyrocketed then what happens isthat we send emails to the governmentsabout the the use of the service and nowthey can access that the dashboard rightthat the product itself so we’ve seenhow like different methods can beapplied to this crisis when dealingright with procurement or being astart-up trying to work with governmentbut the reality is that it’s not easy isnot easy and I think you know we’regonna see more of how startups in thetechnology space working with citygovernments will find creative ways toto continue that relationship becausethings have become a little bit stagnantlike you mentioned earlier today inregards to the challenges that we’refacing with simple products such as facemask and otherof products will now imagine that thelayer of technology which is morecomplex it’s more difficult to make agovernment welcomed a technologycomponent you know without procurementor in an efficient and timely manner andthen even more you know the idea ofwhere do you find a budget when in thetime of crisis budget is of the essenceso those are some of the variables andchallenges that we face and how weovercame this challenge of working withcity government during a time of crisisthank you yeah one thing that we’ve alsoobserved at Fed OCP is just that a lotof the challenges that were already inplace are just magnified right now inthis crisis situation and someone whocan speak well to what’s happeningacross the country right now it’s Gregso Greg it does seem to be the HungerGames out there when it comes tosecuring some of the materials that weneed and everyone seems to be competingwith everyone so I’d love to get yourtake on what policy and coordinationchallenges you’ve seen and also whatstrategies you’ve seen that can help uslead to better results Thanks so yessimilar to the Hunger Games Icharacterized the current state ofprocurement and government is somethingbetween frantic and highly adaptive sortof the twin polls and we kind of heardthat from our speakers from the citiesas well today in our view you knowgovernments are having to buy thingsthey never bought before they buy themfaster than they’ve ever bought anythingbefore sometimes they’re trying toextend and repurpose existing contractsmake a decision about what’s anemergency and what’s not an emergency areal emergency and do all this whilewe’re working from home dealing withbudget shortfalls and still maintainingethics and transparency to BeddoesCommons the GPL has heard a lot recentlyabout states competing with each otherin sourcing ppl PPE but there’s actuallya lot of cooperation going on that wesee mainly at a regional level citiesand states are frequently in touch witheach other and with nationalorganizations like the nigp the NationalInstitute for governmental procurementand there were cities partners includingresults for Americasunlight foundation or ourselves just toshare tips and get ideas some of thethings we’re seeing happening right nowwe expect will end once we’re out ofthis and other things we certainly hopewill continue so we hope there’s someactually good things to pull out of thisin the endin terms of those things that expectwill end there’s been a move away fromcompetitive bidding for essential goodsand services to Michael’s point somesome of the sourcing that’s happeningjust trying to find stuff and not reallyworrying about the price or the sourceand trying to establish the service isthe legitimate or genuine source so forexample some action to deal with thisthe governor Connecticut Ned Lamontrecently exec issued an executive orderallowing for a waiver of competitivebidding in emergency situations only thecompetitive bid requirement is probablythe single most time-consuming processin procurement so it probably makessense to suspend that when you have animmediate need for PPE and their AOrestricts the waiver to Kogan relatedpurchases and they will go back tocompetitive bidding once Kogut is overso on to sort of those examples ofadjustments the government’s are makingto procurement practice that we hopewill continue one is the adjustment towork from home both for staff and forvendors procurement processes have beenheavily paper-based in many places andface to face going into the pandemic andgovernments have now been forced to moveto things like online vendor conferencesand online proposal submission no longerdo you have to drop off ten hard copiesof your proposal into a marked box andhave them you know tabbed andspiral-boundthat’s that will no longer be the caseNew Orleans had a requirement that thereare FP evaluation committee would meetto do evaluation scoring in an openpublic meeting which is great fortransparency I’d never actually seenthis anywhere else but it’s not so goodfor social distancing so a few weeks agoNew Orleans held their first onlineevaluation committee meeting in publicbut online and it went well so they’llbe doing this this way for theforeseeable futurethese kind of adaptations that get ridof outdated cumbersome practices we hopewill live on and the good permanentimprovements the procurement processand we see as repurposing of existingcontracts to adapt to the currentsituation another example from NewOrleans is the one-stop WorkforceServices vendor is now helping peoplewho are out of work to fill outapplications for unemployment insuranceand help them navigate the system and inDetroit we work with an office therethat formerly did lower income homerenovation projects they completelyshifted their efforts to help peopleapply for programs to be able to stay intheir homes so we’re seeing this kind offlexibility and adaptability happeningin many of the places we work and ittells me that in the future that statelocal governments will want to thinkmore broadly about the needs of thepeople they serve and work with vendorsand providers to figure out how to meetthose needs with more flexible andadaptable contracts our work at thegovernment performance lab generallytries to get governments to determinewhat results they want to achieve withcontracts and then design performancemeasures and senses to drive towardsthose results so we want to helpgovernments move away from just fundingactivities and toward funding outcomesand it turns out that what they’re doingin response to the crisis is actuallymoving them in this directionthey’re learning more about themarketplace some things that we neverthought we’d have to learn but certainlymoving in that direction they’recollaborating more with their serviceproviders to adapt contracts to newreality and they’re ready I think totake the next step of developingcontracts that reward innovation andresults and we’re happy to help themwith that stuff great thank you Gregalso thinking about solutions I’d loveto hear from you Marielle about the workthat you do with collaborativepurchasing and what other approachesyou’ve seen work well in this time yeahthanks so um Cobra cure helps localgovernments generally save time andtaxpayer dollars by sharing contractsand we serve a few hundred governmentsacross the United States so when westarted getting requests for help fromlocal governments looking for PPE westarted with what we knew which wascooperative contracts so as Craigmentioned like during non-emergencysituations governments typically have tobuy off of contracts creating createdexcuse me througha formal competitive bidding process andas an alternative to running a newcompetitive bidding process whichtypically takes like 4 to 24 monthsgovernments can buy from suppliers thatare already on contracts through thatother governments have created so byusing a shareable or cooperativecontract government buyers can can savetime and oftentimes also achieve costsavings through aggregated purchasingpower so our core product is a free toolthat helps governments find and buy fromthose suppliers available on cooperativecontract and we responded initially tothe PPE crisis by putting a list ofsuppliers together that were availableto sell those items that we were seeinggovernment’s needed to purchase throughexisting contracts the interesting thingwas that we realized that the problemthat we were solving for was no longercompliance so because it’s an emergencysituation the requirement to buy off ofcompetitively bid contracts has beenwaived for most agencies what werealized is that we were actuallysolving for this problem of trust assome of the other panelists havementioned especially in this momentwhich has been described as the WildWest of purchasing we are seeingextremely elevated levels of pricegouging competition counterfeit productsand fraud it’s a very chaotic situationand so it’s not surprising thatgovernment’s want to purchase fromsuppliers that other governments havealready purchased from because theytrust these suppliers more they’ve beenthrough a diligence process they’ve soldother government customers they havemore of a reputation because they’vebeen established for a long amount oftime so our initial response again ather procure was to help government sharethose suppliers that were alreadyavailable on contract but we also veryquickly experienced like this need is sogreat and many of those existingsuppliers quickly ran out of availableinventory many of them are starting tocome back online but there was a periodof a few weeks at least where the knownsuppliers that were available andtrusted had nothing or were unsure aboutwhen they would have inventory again andso we we really felt a need to supportlocal governments that we serve bystarting a source and diligence newsuppliers and so we very quickly learnedof course that actually sourcing newsuppliers isn’t hard sourcing real andnot fraudulent suppliers in other wordsdoing the diligence on the suppliers isthe really hard part and that’s becausethere’s limited time to conduct apotentially really complicated processthat in again normal times would requireboots on the ground seeing you know themanufacturers and the factories and soat on the one hand you know you have areally urgent need you have to movequickly if you want to get access toavailable inventory but on the otherhand like you’re being asked to purchasesomething that is inherently extremelyriskyso actually collaboration we foundbecomes really important here too andwhat I mean by that is not collaboratingto work together to create contracts butcollaborating together to to build trustand do that diligence process faster sowe’ve seen that local governments havebeen sharing the suppliers that they’reworking with so that other governmentscan fast-track their diligence andvetting process and what we’ve the rolethat we’ve played during this time onCobra cure is essentially helping tocollect and record those purchasingexperiences and then elevate newsuppliers that have successfully servedlocal governments before and have averified buyer reference to a listessentially of more vetted and trustedsuppliers you know I think it’s clearthat we need more collaboration we needto be buying together not just at thelocal government level but at thefederal level to compete on this Googlemarket for masks and other items andunfortunately in the absence of acoordinated federal response we’ve youknow we’ve seen some collaborationactivity like States you know Californiafor instance stepping up to purchasematerials and even sending some of thosematerials to other states and we haveseen some regional organizations likeone of our partners in the Kansas Citymetro area the mid-america RegionalCouncil leading regional efforts tosource PPE and aggregating thesepotentially smaller orders that wouldn’totherwise be able to get outto legit PPE supply together socollaboration is happening andpurchasing but not enough and once againat the local government level I thinkwe’ve seen coordination collaborationinvolving working together on diligenceand helping peer agencies navigate theWild West of of PPE purchasing and Ithink overall we’ve been reallyencouraged by how many local agencieshave provided feedback about suppliersto enable governments other governmentsto progress faster and with a higherlevel of trust during this this time ofneedgreat thank you Marielle sky so youstarted in your introduction to talk tous about some of the challenges that oursmall and medium businesses have had andwe’d love to hear more about what theseSMEs can do and what local governmentscan do to help make it through thiscrisis since they have been so hard hitand will be so important as part of ourrecovery efforts yes thank youdefinitely very important to help smallbusinesses now more than ever so firstand foremost I want to say that I reallysympathize with our government agencyprocurement professionals right now Iknow it is not easy the things thatMichael and Jennifer have sharedwe’ve been talking to lots ofprocurement some executives are allacross the country both on the privateand in public sector and it is a hardtime especially when you’re in theimmediate crisis situation right and andMichael and I have talked about thisseveral times before but if I want totake a step back for a second becauseyes technology can help I think what weneed is a shift in mentality thementality of government procurement andbado mentioned this as well governmentprocurement has always been historicallya very offline very in-person processthat’s really designed more for largecompanies it is that no one ever accusedsi P or Oracle on being a user-friendlysystem but those are the systems thatare most often used and right now weneed innovation we need a new way ofthinking we need to come together asMary was mentioning to be able to dothis in a centralized effort and that’snot how the system is instead of rightnow I’m really hoping that now thatwe’re starting hopefully starting tomove out of that immediate panicsituation into how do we think aboutmaking changes for the long term to helpbenefit things we can we can reallyassess the fact that we need morecentralized systems across the board andwe need to make things easier I knowthat the tendency is to go after peopleto go after suppliersyou have worked with for a long timebefore but we’ve talked about this onthis call you can’t always use the samepeople over and over again and by theway most of those home suppliers are notminority and women-owned businessesbecause it’s traditionally very hard forthem people who are getting hardest inthis in this Kovach crisis areminorities both from the healthperspective and from a financialperspective yet there there’s a ton ofinnovation that’s happening in thisspaceand we know several small businesseseven in the LA area who have said wewant to help we can repurpose oursystems to be able to make things thatpeople need right now to be able to makePPE and supply those but where do we gowho do we go to so on the one hand whilethe the traditional mentality is let’smake this easier so let’s create anotherwebsite for people to go to that is justa little bit 19 related in focus and canbypass some of these long lengthyprocesses it actually can exacerbate theproblem because if you have every agencythen already having their traditional nowebsites and paths and then on top ofthat now we have these new Comid-nineteen different websites andpaths and there’s no coordination amongthem it’s mass confusion and mass chaosand me the impetus is on moving quicklybecause small businesses are dying outby the hundreds and thousands right nowwe’ve been beating this drum for thepast three and a half years but it hasnever been more evident than it is rightnow that small businesses are thebackbone of this economy make up half ofall employment and we’re seeing thisright now I know we’re talking aboutlocal local governments but I have toshare this out with you because it wasjust so mind-boggling for me that theSBA received over 44 million loanapplications from small businesses thereare 30 point 2 million small businessesin the United States ok so when I talkto them I said well how do we have thiswell what’s the issue and they said wellnumber one the biggest issue is thatthere is when you apply for a loanthrough the SBA you don’t receive anemail saying that your application wasreceived so first and foremost peopledon’t even know if their application canreceive so now they’re just we havein multiple places right but butsecondly no one knows there’s nocommunication there’s no transparency asvidoes mentioning and no status updatesor anything so you don’t know if whereyou are in the queue if they’re gonnaget to you money is running out etc somillions of small businesses will notmake it and though it is really hardand people are pulling back on theirprocurement budgets we have to find away to work with more small and minorityand women-owned businesses because thisis the crux of the economy and I thinkit’s the best way to do that is tocentralize efforts and make the processeasier for everyoneperiod and that’s really what we’ve doneand what we focus on and a bazaar isjust a centralized procurement andsourcing process where you have thatlinked in for the supply chain so youhave that centralized aggregated oneplace to find and vet suppliers and thenhave your procurement your RFP processand an RFP process I think I hope we aredone with the days of 375 page partiesright can I just put it out there rightnow like that needs to end because we’veseen that we can get things done so muchfast they’re so much more efficient ifwe don’t have that in the vetting youknow we’ve heard people say well if youdon’t have those long RFPs you know wecan’t get through the vetting processthese are two different things these aretwo different things one thing is whatis the need let’s focus on the need andhave needs-based procurements and agileprocurement methodology and the othercomponent is betting so while there’sthere are some things that smallbusinesses can do I’m to better fromyour familiarize themselves withdifferent processes I really think thethe biggest thing that will help is tobe able to centralized governmentsystems a habbit coordinated to make ituser-friendly and just to make it easierso that we can get through procurementand it doesn’t take ya six months to ayear for every procurement processthat’s astrong strong message to end on andbefore we go to our open conversation Ihave one final question for ourpanelists and that’s if you could answerin one sentence as we emerge from thesereally challenging times what are thelessons that you hope that the people onthis call will take away from ourcurrent experience to improve ourrecovery efforts as you move ahead andwe can start with NATO governments tendto be reactive not proactive these timeshave really changed the way thatgovernments are adapting to differenttrends and with that I think comes thisresponsibility right from the privatesector or small businesses or startupsto support governments in this trial youknow in their period and the way thatlooks like is by you know launchinginitiatives or pilots that can supportgovernments in addressing and you knowfighting this type of viruses like Ovidbecause I think you know as we see onthe news and we read more of these thesecrisis may become prolonged and we mayhave waves of these virus right so thequestion is as government will continueto adapt what is the private sector whatare small businesses and startups goingto do to support these governments inthe next wave or situations where we’regonna find challenges regards to healthgreat thank you and JenniferyouI guess if I’m limited to one sentientaspiration I think Michael Oh may agreeI think digital procurement is just morecritical than ever I mean it touchesupon when everybody said if you have acentralized I think sky was talkingabout centralized I was taking notes asfolks were talking this guy’s talkingabout centralized Greg’s talking abouteliminating paper and duplicativepractices thanos talking abouttransparency Mariel is talking aboutsourcing if you have a digitalend-to-end system that is managing thewhole process that is providingtransparency for all that’s collectingdata and information how critical isdata and information to responding tothis crisis knowing who’s on thefrontlines knowing who their clients areknowing how many people are being servedknowing where to get your PPE I mean allof that is data that could be stored ina central system and utilized inemergencies like this so I think the onetakeaway is cities need to really getmoving on digital procurement and as Imentioned before Michael and Dan Simonat mocs were really leaders in thisspace certainly for the city of New Yorkwhich is you know one of the largest Ithink we are the largest in the in thecountry in really moving to a digitalplatform to touch all of these goalsthat are all critical in an emergencysituation and also in an everydaysituation great thank you and sky whatare your thoughts while it is criticalto go digital and have digital systems Idon’t think it’s enough I think it hasto be digital user-friendly systems thatmake it easier for both participants touse I mean the amount of times that Ihave edge I personally educated thegovernment of procurement staff on theirown government procurement processes tobe able to accomplish their goals is usdownso yes digitization user-friendly andcentralization is extremely importantand everyone needs to be focused on howdo we do that prevent to prevent thisfrom happening again thank youand Michael yes I would just echo whateveryone else said the one thing that Iwould add is I think in a situation likethis shows you what we are capable of ifwe have to act quickly that I think wehave to be critical about just becausewe can act quickly doesn’t mean that weshould get rid of all of the controlsthat we have in place or the vettingthat we have in place that we need to dobut as you scale up and and go digitalyou should also think about just whatkind of what processes don’t need toexist right because you have that levelof transparency on that level processand you know I think transparencyvisibility all of that is good but italso doesn’t work if you don’t have thetalent and the people who are able andwilling to to actually implement andmake it work and I think that’s that’s afar bigger challenge for all of us thatwe have to invest in thank you Marioyeah I mean I think we do have an havealways had really big common challengesand we tend to handle them at the localgovernment level in a fairly fragmentedway and so we really do need to buildprocurement collaboration muscles forfaster and more effective and inclusiverecovery and I think a lot of that goesback to you know open free availabledata for governments to be able to shareon board suppliers including smallbusinesses when are your own and womenand businesses and essentially like notrepeat and reinvent the wheel everysingle time but to elevate up and bubbleup the things that are working and thegood work that is being done becauseit’s legally possible to share it andthe technology exists it just has notbeen applied in in this domain as muchas it could be so I think thiscollaboration infrastructure and it’ssomething we’re working to build ATCOprocure will be even more essentialduring the recovery than ever beforethank you and Greg you the final wordthanks Kay so I think this is somethingthat Jennifer touched on but werecognized more than ever I thinkthrough this experience that weco-create government services withprivate and nonprofit sectors and so wego back to our lessons learned generallyunderstand the marketplace and engagewith providers collaborate with serviceproviders in an equitable way andshaping what your what your purchasingand develop contracts that rewardinnovation and results great thank youso we’d hoped to reserve some time forall of you here on the call tocontribute your thoughts and your ideasand your questions I am glad to see thatmany of you have already been having alively chat but now is your moment toadd your voices as wellso if you would like to say somethingplease leave a message in the chat OhRory would you like to unmute yourselfan industrial question directly to folksyouhi my name is Jerry McDonald I work withthe University of Oxford’s governmentoutcomes lab we are thinking about howsocial services are changing and how thesocial services and outcomes aroundsocial services need to exchange andadjust and flex but I have a questionthat is more directly related to what Iheardjust now and the question related youknow is are you capturing and sharinginformation about a performance andquality it strikes me is relatively easyto share information about the entityname contract award or price is paid butyou’ve all talked about the importanceof trust how do you digitize trust yeahI can I can start with that so with abetter platform with avasara we have ashared collaborative infrastructure thatallows everyone on meeting multiplegovernment agencies and jurisdictions toshare access to one network of vendorswhich is a centralized ever-growingnetwork and each agency can includetheir own notes about that that vendorand their experiences with that vendorand which we wanted to share acrossagencies the difference is the issue isthat legally a lot of different agenciesare not allowed to share thatinformation with each otherand sometimes not even within otherdepartments within the same organizationso that has been a challenge andcontinues to be a challenge it issomething that we are actively workingon but that’s that’s one of the bigreasons why it hasn’t just existedeverywhere right now because becauselegally you can’t do that and that issuch a great question if anyone from thepanel or others on the call would liketo contribute feel free to unmuteyourselves and and let us know yourthoughts yeah I would just say this is ahuge thing that’s missing in procurementin general is like we spend so much timeand effort getting through thecontracting process and then and I’msure Greg can share a ton more but it’slike and then what happens you know wehad a contractthat existed we had a supplier that didsome work but what were the results whatwere the outcomes that part is so oftenunfortunately missing from the contractmanagement you know process and cycleand it typically you know to myknowledge and in my experience it isn’tcollected in a very standardized processor shared publicly and asked I mentionedthere are some challenges around how doyou design that work and how do youshare it from a legal perspective it’sbeen fascinating I think by necessitykoper curious found ourselves likeasking for feedback basically just in amore binary right around like is thesupplier real and did the stuff that youordered arrived like on time did it meetyour quality expectations etc so it’s avery it’s a very simple rubric for nowand it’s simpler obviously to whenyou’re talking about like commodities orit’s like did it show up was the productlegit it’s much harder and morecomplicated and again I’m sure Gregg hasa lot of experience here but to evaluateservices in part because the way we askor have asked for things occasionally ingovernment as well doesn’t always set upthe relationship for success so it’stricky and it’s really needed and I hopeyou know we have as we think aboutthings that we’re taking in to this kindof new normal that we’re establishingyou know that’s one of the things Ithink I’m excited about where we aregetting more feedback from from buyersand seeing governments sharing thatexperience more and more again just oncommodities for now but we’ll see howthat changes ingress I’m sorry I justwanted up services I’m and Brian andMuriel I’d say this applies to socialservices but equally to technologyservices and capital projects those kindof things we go so far as to say that inyour RFP and this helps with thelegality of it you should indicate thatif you’re as successful and win thecontract under that we’re going to doregular performance checks and thatinformation could be used in makingfuture procurement decisions within amunicipality or that state but wehaven’t gone so far as to say that thatdata which is going to be kind of uniqueto that city or state could be sharedwith otherand I think that the consistency of itthere’s there’s a lot of issues with youknow the you know whether thatsubjective data or subject to data andbut we put it up front than the RFP sothat at least we feel generally as alegal basis for collecting it and usingit focusing government Oh Jennifer I wasjust in the city of New York performanceevaluations are part of the standardpractice contract management I there’scertainly room for improvement but as abasic activity it’s required for all ofour human service contracts and then youknow for goods you have other ways ofevaluating etc but for our servicesperformance evaluations are part of theregular practice they’re also actuallydigitized through our passport platformthey’re actually managed in passportthey’re available for other agencies tolook at when they’re makingdeterminations around a vendorsresponsibility level of responsibilityfor an award and a contract so we haveit centralized and there’s alsoopportunities in our legislation andregulations for general access toperformance evaluation so on the verysort of basic level we have it we’reusing it and thinking about how we canmake them stronger as well hi my name isJudy save you and I’m actually callingfrom Bermuda but I’m on the board ofsomething called a vision spring andsome of you may be familiar with it it’swon a lot of awards they normallyprovide eyeglasses to the basically tothe developing world to the masses forthe first time ever we’re looking atrepurposing our contacts in producingeyewear to making goggles face masksprotective shields etc and focusing onthe US market for the first time so theone of the reasons I’m gonna ask themkronfeld one of the reasons I was veryinterested in this call was to figureout we don’t really have a system foroffering what we normally offer toplaces like India or Ghana for the USthe particular urban us when we see allthese obvious problems so one of thethings I wanted to ask is how would anorganization likebring the does six million dollars worthof work a year how might it access orfind out where is the greatest need forthings like the PPE that we can accessfrom our various sources so it gets tothe the most underserved places ataffordable prices so we’re we haveproducts we want to get it to the rightplaces and find an efficient way ofdoing that helping the neediest first atan affordable price any ideas of how toefficiently do that quickly thank youthe city of New York has a centralizedsourcing webpage so I can I can sendthat along here the link to that butMoxa’s worked with the city to set up aspace for folks and businesses likeyourself to be able to submitinformation about goods and servicesthat are available for the köppen reliefso I can send that to everybody on thechat box Jennifer does that mean doesthat say any and the county and theTransit Authority and the othersurrounding agencies I’m sorry what’syour questiondoes that say if you’re mentioning isthat encompass the county and theTransit Authority and the other agencieswithin the the greater area it’s for thecity of New York and if you’re familiarwith the city of New York we have likeour mayoral agencies and then we havethe agencies that are like hybrids likenature’s like that do we is like thatI’m not sure I my instinct is that it’scovering all of those agencies as wellbut don’t don’t quote me on that butcertainly you’re gonna be covering atleast the 40 mayoral and it’s going intoa centralized hub that is then you knowtaking the next steps with those leavesand where where the need is the greatestand and figuring out how to move productand services along so mythe neural response would be go ifyou’re interested in making yourselfknown just submit and then you know takeit from there and see where that goesgreat and those of you who have otherthoughts feel free to follow up directlywith students she’s put her contactinformation there I know that Dustin hada question and I think it’sunfortunately we were running out oftime I think this is a good one for usto end on yeah and I’ll and the topicmay lead to another panel or some suchso so I’m just linear I’m a formerprocurement officer and we work withprocurement shops around the countrywe’re currently doing new normal designexercises with several public entitiesincluding a major city and the theconcept on that is that we’re not goingback to where we were because there’s noback right where we are in the responseis going to continue and so there’sthings about the procurementorganization that we’ve put on holdwhile we’re dealing with this there’sgoing to still need to be really in putso I’m curious from the entities thatare doing the government side like theNew York and the LA like how are youboth dealing with the current and thenplanning to bring everything else thatyou’ve been doing that you’ve beenhaving to put on hold so that doesn’tbecome the next crisis has that beenpart of your thought process and how areyou how are you trying to address thatMichael you want to go first or sureso yeah the so the county we have somelevel of technical functionality toprovide for online sourcing onlinecontract management online digitalsignatures it’s not I mean frankly it’snot coherent and it’s not built in a waythat allows for easy reporting and it’snot in a place where I want it and sothat was part of my goal I’ve only beenhere for about a year and so part ofthis past year was socializing everyoneand also developing a strategic plan forour next three years which included atransformation a digitalas well as a process one that obviouslytakes resources and it’s unclear rightnow whether or not I’m gonna have theresources to be able to do that so wemight just have to use some belts insuspenders approach in the near termwhile we you know while we figure outwhat our path going forward it’s gonnabe that’s that’s really the the sort ofhigh level answer I do want to stress soyou know when you talk about procurementand we we’ve we touched on this a littlebit is we I think focus a lot on thesourcing right on the competitiveelements and or finding the vendor andgoing to an RFP process we I think GPLdoes a really great job of focusing onthe other important elements likecontract management which I thinkfrankly will be a lot harder to do inthe new normal if we’re not gonna beable to go send people or people don’tfeel comfortable going out into thefield if we have to socially distance ifwe you know there’s a lot of stuff thatI think that as we’ve as we thinkthrough what the 18 what the next 18 to24 months is gonna be like it it’s veryclosely connected to how we as a countryin the world are gonna respond to thisglobal pandemic right it’s not somethingthat even we’re not guaranteed a vaccineso how are we gonna actually keep try tokeep things at this at this at leastworkable level and if it’s gonna haveworkforce implications its that willthat will sort of flow down to where weare today right and so I think that’sgoing to be really challenging for usyeah so how do we maintain I think yourquestion is how do you maintain theregular work while you’re responding toa crisis situation we machs we have theresources we began building a digitalsystem a couple years ago so we have theresources in place we have a quite a bigteam now in place and sooh we’re able to you know in positionourselves internally to new sorts ofteams that work on responding every dayevery hour to the twists and turns ofkovin 19 while still ensuring that wehave folks around and available to keepbuilding out digital procurement we’regoing live with a third major release ofour platform in the next couple ofmonths and that will bring allsignatures online and remove notaries asMichael had mentioned it’s just so muchmore than just the store saying it’sgonna take the whole process from endand online so we continue to build we’recreating new ways of testing we used tobring vendors and agencies into mocks toactually get into the system and try tobreak it we can’t do that now it’s anit’s much more complicated to just sharescreens when you’re in a testingenvironment so thinking of new ways todo that but yeah moving forward becauseas we can see now more than evertransformation to our procurementpractice is essential so we have to keepour eyes on on that road thank you somuch and I can’t imagine better wordsfor us to end onso with that over to Jennifer forclosing commentsyeah um first of all I’m just delightedum how many folks have remained on thecall particularly Michael and Jenniferthank you so much for taking this timeto share your resources and also Michaelparticularly giving us insight about thestresses that you’re under I just wantto honor what all of you are goingthrough and all of you who are on thecall who are doing this frontlineday-to-day procurement this you knowpeople laugh about oh procurement godthat’s so boring it’s essential it’slife-saving right this is a big part ofwhat government does and so it’s reallykind of an honor to be able to spotlightand support that work particularly nowI’m a couple things that Ireally struck me on the call is thisnotion of solving for trust as we goforward what are the new ways that we’regoing to use to solve for trust if youlook at the development of procurementsystems previously the way we solved fortrust was a lot of rules and a lot oflawyers I’m trained as a lawyer I cansay stuff like that are there new fastermore flexible more accessible moreinclusive ways to solve for trusts howdo we how do we solve that problem usingnew technology tools and this also thisnotion of a shift in mentality if we cancreate faster and more flexibleprocesses imperfect ones but faster moreflexible processes for equipment that’sliterally life and death presumablythere is a little bit more flexibilityand experimentation in the system forsome of the run-of-the-mill supplies andservices that governments do so I thinkthis can open up the thinking andperhaps give city and state and countyleaders right the county executives themayor’s really a powerful impetus tomake procurement change andaccessibility more visible and perhaps apriority in for their administration andwe have all of these entities who youknow have been on the call who are partof OCP who are in the Aspen Network whocan help so I really look forward tothinking about what we can do togetherthrough this crisis and then as we startto rebuild what a procurement systemmight look like again that can be fasteffective efficient and equitable sothat the people who are supplying ourcities are as diverse and wonderful andamazing as the people who are living inand leading our cities so thanks so muchfor your time and thoughts for today
Rethink the rules
Governments will always have to spend public money with great care, but the processes and rules that were once used to guard against waste and fraud are being updated. As Michael Owh said, “We should ask ourselves what process we don’t need because there is increased visibility and transparency.” For example, New Orleans has been able to move evaluation scoring, which was previously held offline as a public meeting, online for the first time.
Previously, the way that governments “solved for trust” as Reed put it, was through an extensive system of rules that monitored compliance, or through close relationships with a select group of vendors. Both of these solutions made it harder for women and people of color to sell to government. What’s the mix of technological and process changes to open the system?
“Technology can help, but what we need is a shift in mentality in government procurement,” noted Kelly. “We need to think about how to make changes for the long term.”
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