Submit Your Ideas to Help the Government Leverage Acquisition and Supply Chain Expertise
Today, at the White House Summit on Federal Acquisition & Supply Chain Management, I announced a call for ideas to help us shape how the government obtains and leverages acquisition and supply chain expertise.
This call for ideas supports the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) that requires federal agencies to implement category management, an industry best practice where common contracts are leveraged, meaning that contracts are shared in order to buy common goods and services as an enterprise. Category management has already helped the government eliminate redundancies, increase efficiency, and deliver more value for taxpayers.
At today’s summit, we discussed:
- End-to-End Supply Chain Management – How do the best companies plan for and execute large-scale, global supply chain management (e.g., enterprise resource planning, application of emerging technology for more efficient transactions, etc.)?
- Co-creation with Industry/Academia/Consortia – Where can shared business and other interests lead to new models for program delivery (e.g., shared investments, development of supplier consortia, etc.)?
- Continuous Improvement Cycle – How can key business systems become more agile to keep up with the digital age (e.g., rules of engagement, knowledge transfer, dynamic benchmarking) while reducing friction in the acquisition system?
This call for ideas will help us continue this conversation, as well as discuss mechanisms to answer additional questions like:
- (Benchmarking) How long does it take a comparably-sized organization to develop and deploy a unique technology (or specialized service) so the government can better evaluate its agility and responsiveness?
- (Data/Pricing Sourcing) What external data sources are readily available for real-time access to market trends and pricing data for specific common categories/sectors of spend?
- (Market Research) What is the future of XYZ industry and how should the government prepare for those market changes?
- (Technology) What are the most impactful types of process changes and automation to reduce transaction costs?
- (Continuous Improvement) What are the top 5 inputs that large organizations use to assess their performance, who has access to that data, and how do these organization prioritize change management to become more agile?
- (Human Capital Strategies) There are dozens of private sector credentialing bodies for supply chain management. What is the comprehensive training path for public sector category management professionals across various career paths (i.e. requirement owners, contracting officers, agency leaders) for total lifecycle cost management – including, but not limited to, enterprise buying, implementation of demand and vendor management.
We want to hear from private sector organizations, researchers, academic institutions, good government groups, the public, and others on the vision and concept for a mechanism to facilitate curated conversations between the federal government and external supply chain and acquisition experts on a variety of issues and questions that support the government’s acquisition modernization efforts.
How do you envision the role of this mechanism? How might it operate? How might it be governed? What might its areas of focus be? Those with ideas that could help the government modernize its $575B supply chain and acquisition function through regular engagement among supply chain management and acquisition experts should send them to ideas@omb.eop.gov by 5pm EDT February 17, 2020 with the subject line: “Supply Chain Ideas.”
Stay tuned to performance.gov and @PerformanceGov for updates on what we learn and ways to collaborate.
Please be aware that ideas and feedback submitted may be made publicly available, in whole or part and/or highlighted in conjunction with the PMA. Submitters may be asked to participate in future discussions with other thought leaders. The Category Management Cross Agency Priority Goal Team will not respond to each submission individually, but may reach out via email to individual submitters for clarification if needed. Please do not submit proprietary information. Any information provided may be incorporated into the design of future projects or initiatives. Information submitted in response to this call for ideas is subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. Respondents are advised that the Government is under no obligation to acknowledge, compensate or provide feedback with respect to any information submitted to this call for ideas.