5 Ways GovSpend Can Help SLED Agencies Meet Procurement Goals

Welcome. Welcome. Alright. So today, we're gonna be going over the five ways that GovSpend can help SLED agencies meet procurement goals. What does that mean? What are those things that we're gonna be covering? But before we begin, I would love to just hear from the group today. Obviously, first and foremost, my name is Paige. I've been with GovSpend for the last six years and really excited to show you some of the the items for today. But before we begin, what motivated you to join today? What are you hoping to learn? What are you hoping to gain? Go ahead and use that chat icon in the bottom, and go ahead and put in there. Or you can use the q and a. We'd love to see our our team participate. What are you hoping to gain, or what motivated you to join today? Awesome. How to better use the resources, drive new business, better utilize GovSpend. Awesome. I love to see that. Well, we'll definitely be covering those both topics today. So for our agenda oh, we have one more. Better Techniques, Apex Accelerator. Awesome. Lots of good bunch today, Sarah. Alright. So our agenda for today so the the key five pieces that we're gonna be reviewing today are verifying vendors for credibility and reliability. You know, when we receive these quotes or if we're, you know, partnership, we're trying to connect an agency and a vendor together, is somebody that has worked with government before? Are they gonna deliver the goods and services on time? Are they qualified to work within the public sector? All of those great questions we can answer within the platform. So that's gonna be our first topic for today, followed by sourcing new vendors for goods and services. Sarah, don't we hear all the AI, our clients having issues with trying to collect the amount of quotes needed for these unique niche purchases, parts, all of that great stuff. And and sometimes it's it's tough to find new vendors out there or a a certain number of vendors that can provide the work or the goods and services. So that's gonna be our second topic today, followed by validating your pricing against historical purchase orders. Fun fact, when, I was at GovSpend planning my wedding, I definitely did some price checking in there for some of my vendors who have also done some caring and work within the public sector. So how do we make sure that the prices that we are receiving from our valued vendors that we've been working with year after year or new vendors are in line with market price? Is it because the I'm I've been with them for forever that they're pricing me higher and AI, or are they just trying to get as much out of me? What can I negotiate to really make sure that I'm spending tax dollars wisely and staying within the budget I've allocated for this transaction or this project? Then we'll dive into market research. How do I research for new projects? Some of those projects AI I I think some of y'all on the call today are familiar with are the clean schools project, going green with our transportation within school districts, or our more famously known critical infrastructure information act. How are we ensuring that our agency is optimized for any security threats? Are we maintaining the lever of the the level of security that is required by federal agencies and state and local agencies to withhold? And then lastly, tailor your bids and RFQs for success. What do we need to include? What are we missing? How are we writing some of these proposals to ensure we are maximizing the amount of quote receives that that receivables that we are going to be obtaining, along with weeding out the herd of what we don't want. So ensuring that that we're we're filling out those bid quotes and requests, normally. So without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into the first topic today. And that's gonna be vendor verification. So one of the examples I like to use is let's say I get a quote from Paige's Tires. How do I know Pages Tires is actually a business, and they have done business with other government agencies in my space? Well, within the GovSpin platform, I have these amazing modules on the left hand side, and I'm right here in spending and purchase orders. This is GovSpend's bread and butter. This is what we're known for. This is the information that we have been aggregating since two thousand and ten. So there's a lot of breadth and depth of data to go over and uncover uncover within this module. So over here on the top right, because we are searching for a vendor, a company, that I am going to check and make sure that they are well known, Other agencies or maybe my sister and brother agencies nearby have also used them. I'm gonna go ahead and type in companies. Once I enter pages tires, I don't see any results. It's probably because they have never done business within the public sector. Maybe they're trying to dip their toes and and try and gain some more market share, and develop more partnerships with servicing government agencies, but maybe we don't wanna be the first one to try them. Maybe we wanna find somebody that's a little bit more well established. So as I'm reviewing my quotes and looking at, you know, the vendors that have submitted their responses to me, maybe I also wanna check some of those out AI Bob's Tires. When I look at Bob's Tires, it's gonna pull back anybody that has Bob's Tires in the name within the company name. To ensure that I am getting the right one, I can really narrow it down by using the company name filter. I wanna make sure that I'm looking at the Bob's Tires quote that I received. And I'm just gonna go ahead and select Bob's Tires. This is where I can see who are they working with and what have they done recently. And as you can see, this Bob's Tires, has done quite a bit of work with various agencies, over a hundred and thirty three agencies. This makes me feel a little bit more comfortable with choosing them as a vendor or maybe trying to get them approved as a vendor or a new supplier for tires and other services that they provide. You can do this in any fashion. You can do this for any companies. You just wanna type in the company name, and then the results will go ahead and be yield. So that is vendor verification. That is how we can qualify and review a little research on our vendors. The next one is find new vendors. So one of the things that I like to search often or that I help agencies search often is promotional t shirts. A lot of our SLED agencies, you know, we are always doing fundraisers. We're always trying to do something fun, or the police department is doing a fundraiser or local community event that we wanna put some logos on some promotional products and hand that out. So right here, I typed in items. You can change it from companies to AI, and I input promotional tote bags, promotional t shirt, t shirt printing, and screen printed just to see what vendors are out there. In addition to researching who is providing these services and goods, I also came down here to agency radius. This is where I can identify which agencies in my backyard or sister or brother agencies who they have used for these services. Maybe I have a friend at Miami Dade College that I wanna call and ask how did they like Daedalus consultants or JP more for less? Are they happy with their vendor? Did they get the goods and services on time? Was it the quality, that they were expecting? This is a really great way to identify those, not only those vendors, but agencies in your backyard that are working with these vendors. And then to make sure that I'm looking at the different unit prices, I also added the quantity filter. If I know that I'm hosting a large event and I'm gonna be giving away a plethora of promotional t shirts or having our team of volunteers that are throwing that community event, I wanna put a quantity of fifty and just see what that price point looks like. I can click into any one of these line items. So for an example, I'm just gonna click on this one where it says promotional T shirts for college, colors days. This sounds like a community event. That's in line with what I'm trying to do. I can see it was for Florida Atlantic University, and they purchased from P and S promotional specialties. I can see they're close by. I'm down here in Boca Raton, Florida, so maybe I can save a little money on shipping costs. I know sometimes we like to go with those big name vendors, but sometimes the shipping is what gets us. So maybe if I do a little quick pickup, maybe that'll help with some of the overhead. And right here, I can see that it was for a quantity of two hundred and eight dollars and ninety five cents per shirt for a total of one thousand seven hundred ninety. Now as you're navigating through creating these searches, trying to find the specific product, you know, sometimes it's not as easy as a promotional t shirt. Maybe we wanna do some price checking. What better way to make sure you're getting a qualified price and you're not being priced too high or too low than to use our GovSpend tools. Before I go into how we created this specific search, there's two things that I do wanna point out. As a GovSpend subscriber, you have a fabulous team of, GovSpend experts that are here to support you. So whether you're using down here the little chat with an expert icon where you can chat with us directly or just email Sarah or myself or our support at GovSpend dot com to help whip up a really great report for you. We don't want you to have to, you know, struggle. Hey. Which filter do I use? If you're in a pinch for time and you really quickly just wanna check if that pricing is valid, you could always just let us know the make and model or the project type, and we can help and assist in any fashion. I believe it was Chromebooks. Sarah, we did a quick review with the University of Miami that something that they purchase often is Chromebooks. And we wanted to ensure that the pricing that we received is indeed, not too high and not too low. We're we're getting accurate pricing and not overspending. But before I share that, my favorite story to share is actually our founder, Jeff Rubenstein. He was actually a police officer for the city of Deerfield. And back in two thousand ten, he realized that the AED, the defibrillators that the police department was purchasing, they were paying more than what the fire department was paying with the exact same vendor. It was crazy. He was baffled. And when he found this out, when they were looking at the different quotes and the transactions and the history, he realized this is probably happening all over the nation, nationwide. And this that that exact story is what sparked GovSpend and what created GovSpend today. So through that process, through that experience, identifying a pain that maybe not everybody recognizes, we can see now more transparency in spending. I see something in the chat. Alright. Awesome. Yeah. Throw in some questions over here in the chat or in the q and a. We're here to help and assist in any fashion. Sarah's managing the chat. So when you're working with a product or service that has specific criteria, what better way to look within layering our filters? So right now, I'm looking at Chromebook. There are so many different types of Chromebooks. There's HP, Lenovo, Acer, sixteen gigabyte, eleven gigabyte. Well, the one that we're looking at today is going to be the HP eleven g six. So what I did is I changed my filter to items and plugged in the product, Chromebook. And then over here, I'm gonna put in my adjectives. That could be, you know, the AI. It could be the unit of measurement. It could be a case, ton, pallet, pack. Whatever it is that you were searching, if you're trying to do an apples to apples comparison, you want to ensure that you're you're getting that exact results. So right here, again, we have our Chromebook and eleven g six right here. In addition to that, I didn't want to see any parts. If I clear this filter, you're gonna see that throughout this search, there's a couple of different items. There's a a keyboard, a replacement, a battery, assembly, some service, some warranty. I don't wanna price check any of that. Again, I wanna make sure I'm looking at apples to apples, Chromebooks to Chromebooks. Now if I received a quote recently from Walmart, if I go to walmart dot com and I look Chromebook up, it's it's roughly around three hundred bucks. So let's make sure I'm getting an accurate AI, or maybe I need to switch vendors or find a new vendor. I'm gonna go ahead and say, hey. If it's less than two fifty, two fifty is probably gonna be one that's scratched or refurbished. And then on the high end, three fifty. This is gonna be that sweet spot for that product that I'm looking for. And now I can see a nice grouping of transactions. I can see somewhere they're paying more than three hundred for what I was quoted and sometimes less. So it sounds like I got a pretty decent deal, but Bristol School District of Wisconsin, they purchased from AGParts Worldwide, and they're currently twenty percent off. I wonder if I were to reach out to AGParts Worldwide and say, hey. I'm not a current, client of yours, but I did see that you worked with my sister agency, Bristol School District, and that you receive or you provided them a twenty percent off discount. Is there any way for the volume of Chromebooks I'm trying to acquire that you could give us the same great price of two ninety eight? Or maybe chromebook parts dot com, two hundred and sixty three. This is one of those hidden key ways to make sure, again, that we're spending tax dollars AI. We're saving as many pennies as we can, especially during the AI of our use it or lose it funds or if we've been using a lot of those funds, maybe where we can cut costs. I hear from a lot of our clients that the goal is to reduce the, operation cost by ten to fifteen percent. So if we're able to identify some new vendors that are well established in the government, government industry, Let's maybe find some ways. Let's build some partnerships. So far, we have reviewed the first three, which are vendor verification, find new vendors, and price checking. Are there any, maybe any recent transactions or recent quotes that anybody received that we wanna use as a quick example, other than Chromebooks? Is there maybe lawn equipment, MRO, a small equipment vehicle, or maybe a new car. Go ahead and throw it in the chat. Let's go ahead and use an example. Or for our Apex Accelerators, any new vendors or new clients that you're working with that offer a certain goods or services that we wanna see the market? Oh, okay. Jasper engines. Okay. Can you give me a little bit more information on Jasper engines? Let's take a look, a quick Google search on Jasper engines. So we're looking at new transmissions, powertrain. We may need to do a transmission replacement. Oh, auto parts. Now if I look at Jasper Engines, just as an example, let's say new engines. Let's do let's do, like, a Ford Interceptor or something. Maybe maybe we need to replace an engine on a police vehicle or fleet vehicle. I can come over here and just type in let's type in any field, Jasper engines. When I type in Jasper Engines, you're gonna see direct and indirect transactions. Let's see what Jasper Engines is doing in the market. So it looks like they're big in the Midwest, but they also have some, business in Arizona. If I take a look at some of this information, of course, the transmission and the engine are gonna be a little bit different because it depends on the vehicle. It's gonna depend on the vehicle. So if I scroll further down, we could look at highway department or engine replacement. Over here on the left hand side, we can go ahead and type in engine or transmission if we wanna look at those specific transactions. And, of course, right here, once it loads We got a confirmation too. The website was correct. Okay. Perfect. Jasper Engine Exchange. Alright. Let's narrow it down. Company name, exchange. And here we go. Transmission. So here are what some of the other agencies are paying for those specific engine replacements, new engines, remanufactured engine. So if you're working with Jasper engine, it looks like they're pretty popular with amongst, nationwide. They're they've got quite a different states and areas that they are servicing, so that may be a valued vendor. Alright. We got another one at swag Swagelok Swagelok. Of course. Of course. Happy to look. So Swagelok is up next. What is Swagelok? That that's an interesting name. If you can put in the chat to narrow down the the search, that would be helpful. So I'm gonna type in Swagelok. It looks like a specific part that maybe they sell through resellers as well. Fluid system components. Okay. So I'm gonna do Swagelok under any field because that's a specific brand. I wanna make sure that the product that we are looking at is specific to Swagelok. And if I do fluid system oops. Let me type that. Remember, we wanna pair our keywords. And here we can see, historically, what have they sold. It doesn't look like anything fairly recent. I'm gonna safely assume that this this fluid system product for Swagelok, is something that lot lasts quite a while and isn't replaced as often as maybe AI a air filter. But taking a look at this information, swage Swagelok and fluid system, here's some of the history that they have done. We can click on any of these purchase orders. We can even add additional keywords and phrases. Maybe we wanna look at specific Swagelok valves that are part of those fluid systems. You can get as granular as you would like. And as you can see, we've got a couple of different types of valves. We can put in the sizing or, shape. Maybe it's an l valve or just a straight pipe valve. Leveraging these filters are really gonna help hone in on the specific price point and do some price checking or vendor verification for you. Awesome. Well, thanks team for participating. Let's go ahead and move along over to our market research. Market research, that is a big topic. All the time I hear about all these new initiatives in the news, the clean schools program, the, you know, critical infrastructure information act, Alyssa's law, different grants that are being awarded so that even in I think it was the the clean air or quality air in the state of Arizona, trying to make sure that they're providing communities with cleaner air. So a lot of funds are being released to cities and municipals to, provide to their teams. So let me go ahead and reset our filters. And if we're doing market research, let's stick to the the clean schools. Everybody loves a good electric bus, electric vehicle, EV charging. Everybody knows what that looks like. So if I wanna look up EV charging stations, Who is our top ten companies that are providing that? And of those top ten companies that are providing that product to my sister and brother agencies, who would I wanna choose? What what is the cost associated with maybe the installation or the actual product itself? So I'm gonna do EV charging, EV charging station. You know what? One agency, you know, our clerk that's putting on the purchase order calls tomato, the other calls potato. Electric vehicle charging station. Oops. Forgetting the g. And voila. Now taking a look at this information, not only can I look at it by purchase order AI purchase order or line item by line item, I can also look at it by company? Who in this space is being awarded the most or most often? And as you look at this list of companies that are providing EV charging stations, accessories, and materials, and services, we can see that ChargePoint is is pretty much at the top. ChargePoint seems to be kind of like the the brand leader in charging stations. And when I click on sales, I can now see who are they working with? What services are they providing? Is it just the equipment, or are they a full service company where they not only provide the product, but also the service and maintenance and repairs when needed. Here are some of those other agencies that they're providing the work for. And not to my surprise, lots of California, lots of Texas as some of the leading states on going green when it comes to fleet vehicles, and so on and so forth. So this is a really great way to do your research. Hey. What is the installation cost on this project? Is my team budgeting appropriately for this project? Am I going to have all of the information and services needed if I choose this vendor versus maybe one that is only supplying the product? National car charging. This one's a little bit farther down, but still being awarded a lot of business and often. If I scroll farther down, here are some of the agencies that they are working with. Lots of campus universities, lots of parking garage installations. And it looks like this one does a little bit larger of projects, larger parking structure projects, just looking at the volume and the dollar amount. This one is charging equipment for four different locations, but I don't see any repairs, and I don't see any maintenance. It looks like they just do the product and installation. Now when it comes to market research, sometimes I'm a visual person. Sometimes I wanna see what the trends are. If I go over to the analytics page right here, this is gonna show me the trends year over year, quarter over quarter. When are those peaks spending? When is the best time? It's kinda like cars. If you're purchasing a car, there are certain seasons, certain months that you wanna make those big purchases. And maybe it's just better pricing or just time of the year, especially in your your in those Midwest states or northern states where it's heavily snowing in the winters and they're harsh. I probably don't wanna install an electric vehicle charging station in the middle of winter. So maybe there's a certain time frame that I need to make that purchase. Maybe I make that purchase in the wintertime or in the fall or in the winter so that in the summertime, we're doing that installation when students or attendance at some of the committee meetings are lower where we're not causing too much friction with parking. So just some of those questions that we wanna ask ourselves for some of these larger projects and do some market research and make sure that we're planning our procurement effectively. Alright. Is there anybody who wants to do some market research? Any large project or is anybody building, like, a new aquatic center, a new community center, any large construction projects in the foreseeable future, or maybe large events that they are having? Go ahead and put it in the chat, and maybe we can do a little market research example for you so we're not just coming up with examples. We wanna make sure it resonates with the team. Give some folks some time to to type in the chat. Oh, FIFA World Cup. Yes. It's definitely happening in larger cities. Oh, I love this. So sounds like we're gonna need some barricades and some crowd control for our communities and our cities to handle the amount of tourism that maybe our cities are gonna be experiencing. So if I wanted to prepare for what those types of events or maybe what other agencies are preparing for the FIFA World Cup. I can even just type that event in. So FIFA World Cup. Let's see if anybody is doing any types of transactions. Looks like we got a lot of tickets for the FIFA World Cup, the FIFA World Cup, some soccer ball things. So it doesn't look like anything's making some heavy transactions just yet for FIFA. But let's go ahead and look at barricades and crowd control. Barricades I can't type today. Barricades and crowd control. We're gonna get a lot of tourism, lots of heavy foot traffic. Pedestrian control. Is that a oh, people use that. Now I'm just making up words. Well, let's go ahead and see. Now if I wanna look into barricades, crown control, pedestrian control, there's so many different types of barricades. But I wanna see who the market leader is. If I'm going to handle a large volume of tourism and a large project such as the FIFA World Cup, I wanna know who are those market leaders. Who even has not only the capital to supply me the amount of product that I would need for that crowd control, but who's has extensive teams or maybe nationwide market presence where they can ship in bulk to me. And also just make sure that we're getting that quality that we are expecting. And so as we look at some of this information, we can see, United Rent Defense pretty high up there. They've done some very large bulk projects such as the fourth of July crowd control for the city of Aurora. We also have Aardvark tactical. This might be a little bit more on the police front for barricades, crowd control, yeah, riot gear. This would be more for preparing our police or emergency response for some of those types of events. But just to see what all goes into it or what that price point is, Maybe we can even look at a sister agency or a sister city that is of like size and similar population to see what is the average amount of barricades or price point that they pay for their crowd control. So all very different ways to layer the filter and hone in on that market research. Let's look at Granger. I know Granger's does a lot of ones and twosies. Yeah. Granger Granger's great. They do a little bit of everything. But as you can see, the they're they aren't in bulk amounts the same way that United run defenses for barricades. So hopefully, that helped with your FIFA research. So just a quick recap before we get into our final best practice within gov spend to hit procurement goals. We've gone over vendor verification, AI new vendors, price checking, making sure we're not getting AI too high, asking for those discounts if we see our sister agencies getting some discounts. Market research, preparing for all the things that go into those projects and making sure we're not missing any specific services, installation fees, shipping fees. We're taking that all in consideration as we are budgeting and planning a project. But my favorite and last one is going to be bid and RFP research. So over here, so far, we've been in spending and purchase orders. I'm gonna navigate to bids and RFPs. Now this module isn't just for vendors who want to respond to those bids and RFPs that leverage our tool. This is also a really great market research or an area for research if we are writing a proposal or planning to write a proposal or working with our bid team to curate the perfect bid packet to make sure we're capturing everything in that project. The first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna look at open and expired. The time line doesn't necessarily apply to us. We just wanna see how other agencies are writing those bids. So for an example, let's do, on the topic of World Cup, let's do barricade. Barricade for, I don't know, fourth of July. If somebody wanted to do barricades for the fourth of July Let me go ahead and rewrite that. Barricades crowd control, pedestrian control. Oh, look at this one. Market research. I think it's city of Los Angeles. Maybe we had some telepathy right there. So city of Los Angeles, market research pedestrian barricade. LA is a huge city, so this would be a really great bid to take a look at and see how did they AI it. They have a very large population, heavy foot traffic, lots of tourism. How do we handle that type of influx? So right here, you're gonna have the title of the bid, a brief description of, you know, brief recap of what it is that they are requesting. And then over here under the files, here's their final RFQ. When we click on the link, this is gonna bring us to that document of how they are writing that RFQ. What is their practice? Maybe who is a person that we wanna reach out to, a colleague or a network? Milton, it would be our person to reach out to for the, Los Angeles City. And if I scroll farther down, it looks like they were doing interlocking six and a half feet, a quantity of two hundred and fifty. And this is a per week and per day and per month. So that's some of the rates that we can expect. It's not a per day or per week. They also have a per month option just to take a look at what that that pricing may be. Maybe it's a discount if you the more you buy or the more length of AI, it's a little bit different. And then, of course, we have the delivery. I see all the time agencies forget to include a space for delivery or shipping costs or installation. So those are some of the ways that we can reference previous executed bids or previously written bids for similar products. Or maybe even for our Jasper engine example. Maybe we wanna see what components or aftermarket warranty or any warranties that they are asking for to be included in some of those products. I'm gonna go ahead and go back. And let's just pick another one. Salt Lake County Barricade Rentals. This one include furnishing, delivering, installing, maintain, and removing. They've also included the removal cost of this barricade. Definitely something that we wanna go ahead and include in our requests. Again, gonna click on the AI, and this is the event, and this is how they are writing it. This one looks a little bit more simpler. This is the different commodity codes that they have selected to alert some of those vendors that have those commodity codes selected to be alerted on those types of opportunities, making sure that we're we're getting the eyes on our quotes. And some of the scope, annual purchase, and some other, specs that maybe we wanna take in consideration. Date removed, tracking number for delivery and pickup. Oh, I know I would have missed that one. So, So hopefully, the different, best practices within GovSpend and the various use cases that we reviewed today, resonate with the team. You can take it back and share this recording with your procurement network and other individuals, whether they are a Gov spend subscriber or not. We are in the interest of helping our favorite partners, our government agencies and PTACS and Apexes to really bring vendors and agencies closer together. That way we're spending tax dollars wisely. We're we're having seamless, opportunities with projects and and going smoothly. If you have any questions, or would like to have a one on one session with Sarah and the team, please don't hesitate to reach out. Our email is support at GovSpend dot com. We're here to support you with your procurement goals as we get towards the end of, fiscal twenty four and entering twenty five. Thank you so much for attending. And, of course, Sarah put the email in the, chat, and the recording will be going out shortly. Thank you all for attending.