Orange County strengthens procurement operations and supports local businesses with Pavilion

As the sixth largest county in the United States, Orange County was looking to strengthen their procurement operations and support local economic development. With 250 deputy procurement officers managing more than $2 billion dollars of spend, it was difficult to effectively coordinate across procurement teams.

Maria Agrusa, Orange County Procurement Officer, noted, “We’re all procuring the same goods and services under the same constraints. But there was no collaboration or standardization across the 22 departments, leaving each department on its own to figure things out.”

These challenges were not unique to Orange County. Others in the region were facing these hurdles, too. Maria saw an opportunity: “Why not eliminate the duplication of effort and take advantage of our buying power wherever possible?”

Harnessing the power of cooperative procurement and regional collaboration

In 2022, the County launched the Orange County Procurement Alliance, a group of 34 local public entities in the region, to collaborate on procurement.

One of the first steps she took was to implement Pavilion as their search engine to find, use, and share contracts across Alliance members. Pavilion allows public entities to search across the nation’s largest network of national cooperative, state, and local contracts – for free.

Within a week, Orange County started adding its awarded contracts to Pavilion and was the first public entity to add the Pavilion search bar directly into their County’s website. This made it easy for County staff and Procurement Alliance members to find and use Orange County contracts, plus Pavilion’s broader network of shareable contracts, all in one place.