Measuring Procurement: A Key Way to Demonstrate Its Value

In many agencies, procurement is often a division or function within a finance department. Which means that it is important for procurement to have meaningful performance measures.

The Government Finance Officer Association’s Distinguished Budget Presentation award criteria require governments to include performance measures in their budget documents and finding the most appropriate measures often is a complicated task.

Typically, performance measures are used to collect information about operational activities, achievement of goals, community conditions, or other factors.

When setting performance measurements, public procurement teams should focus on making sure that measures meet two key criteria:  

• Relevant – measures can be clearly linked to the service delivery/program outcomes that they are intended to measure and readily understandable
• Collectible – measures are available and do not involve excessive time/effort to collect

For example, some common metrics for procurement teams might include:

• Number of solicitations issued
• Percentage of Solicitations Awarded on Schedule
• Percentage of Requisitions Processed within 10 Working Days
• Average Number of Days to Award Request for Proposals
• Average number of proposals received per solicitation
• Percentage of disadvantaged/minority/women-owned businesses who participate in solicitations
• Percentage of Solicitations with no-bid or one bid only
• Average number of addendums per solicitation

Automation can be helpful in setting metrics. An eProcurement system can collect this data and have it readily retrievable at any time for compilation and reporting. Automation can also track every step in the process, such as when a bid and each addendum was issued, how many questions were received, which suppliers viewed or downloaded the document, the number of responses, and diversity participation through real-time certification verification.

PlanetBids’ PB System™ has extensive reporting features that can help your organization track and measure performance. Documents can be uploaded to the PB System™ dashboard and the PlanetBids software will compile the reports using your pre-set metrics.

When Procurement is requesting additional resources during the budget process, or demonstrating its value to the organization, words are good, but numbers to back up the words, is even better!

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