Suppliers Face Many Challenges when Working with Government

Editor’s Note: Jarrod McAdoo is the Senior Product Marketing Manager at Ivalua, a leading provider of global spend management cloud solutions.

Many suppliers who wish to work within the public sector are finding that long, costly, and complex procurement cycle times, lack of clarity on how to connect with Public Sector organizations, and a perception that competition is just “for show” and new suppliers have little chance of winning are the biggest barriers they face.

But greater transparency, engagement, and an improved understanding of public agency goals and forecasts would go a long way in helping suppliers build trust and better plan their sales as many suppliers (especially new and innovative suppliers) covet the consistent revenue that can be found with Public Sector contracts.

Agencies can establish trust and suppliers can gain significant efficiencies and save time and money if agencies were to provide better data and information regarding their procurement plans. While larger companies can put resources to do adequate market research and wade through thousands of potential opportunities, smaller suppliers lack the resources to seek out and screen information, leaving them to respond at a moment’s notice to new and emerging opportunities.

In particular, smaller (often innovative) companies are disproportionately affected due to greater resource constraints. Additionally, evaluation criteria and requirements are seen as onerous, generic and too rigid, precluding innovative companies from fully demonstrating the value they can bring to supporting public agency missions.

Rigidity of requirements also further prevents suppliers from proposing innovative and potentially more cost-effective solutions. Too often, small suppliers perceive that agencies care more about the process than the outcomes.

Early and ongoing engagement of suppliers should be a critical priority. Whether it is outside of a specific procurement or in support of a procurement, early and ongoing engagement will provide suppliers visibility and clarity on procurement goals and help them make better forecasts. In addition, having visibility into an agency’s goals and procurement forecasts can help suppliers better plan and be more prepared to respond to government needs.

Government leaders should also focus on providing clear guidance, messaging and resources that can help small businesses and entrepreneurs learn quickly. This includes pushing more direct messaging or collaborating with commercial channels to make suppliers aware of opportunities. Simply publishing opportunities to a site that contains a large pool of other opportunities may not reach the smaller innovative suppliers.

Government agencies that provide the minimum level of transparency force each supplier to figure out the context for themselves. This is likely to lead to one of two negative outcomes: either the supplier gives up because, despite the transparency, there is no context to give them an adequate understanding, or they may misunderstand the meaning of what they are seeing because of the lack of context. Rich reporting data from targeted public portals can provide much of the context that has been missing in the past and dramatically reduce the frequency of these negative outcomes.

The public sector will always face specific and unique challenges and a dynamic regulatory environment.

Transparency should be a cure for those challenges, providing a highly compliant process with consistent and rich openness. Transparency makes it possible to shift the strategic direction of an agency without having to be defensive. It is the intent and desired outcomes driving the need for transparency, not the transparency itself, that offers the greatest value to the public and suppliers alike.

The ability to communicate with government officials continues to be a major barrier, although it has improved over time. Rooted in the widespread norms and culture of public procurement are the practices that keep government officials from communicating with suppliers. The good news is that this is widely acknowledged with some level of movement towards solutions and culture change.

Meeting supplier usability and transparency expectations may seem like the right short-term objective, but big picture goals for Public Sector Procurement need to do more than ‘check the box’ on supplier engagement. While it may be a driving force, just avoiding a bid protest does not necessarily mean a supplier engagement was successful. The supplier experience – actually user experience in general – has been neglected for far too long. The resulting gap between commonly used Procurement platforms and B2C purchasing websites has created a misalignment that contract officers must address by making real investments in the supplier experience.

In the end, government agencies want to work with the best suppliers available, and suppliers want to have opportunities to seek and secure government contracts. It should be category objectives and product or service specifications that qualify and disqualify suppliers, not their ability to tolerate procurement processes.

If it is too hard to identify solicitation opportunities or participate in the evaluation process and transact in general, suppliers will invest their business development energy elsewhere – a lost opportunity for both sides. Fortunately, with focused and innovative technology solutions, it is now possible to achieve a consumer-like experience for users and suppliers while meeting the unique requirements of the Public Sector.

SC
MR