This year, 2024, marks the 40th year of the George Cronin Awards for Procurement Excellence. Named after NASPO’s first president, these awards provide well-earned recognition and appreciation for state procurement offices and officials whose forward-thinking, dedication, and hard work significantly benefitted their state. Each year, a 12-person committee comprised of and led by NASPO members individually evaluates all submissions based on four established criteria:

• Innovation,
• Transferability,
• Service Improvement, and
• Savings & Efficiency.

The Cronin Awards are part of NASPO’s mission to promote the public procurement profession. They are a great opportunity to honor and direct national attention to the important and extraordinary work of our members. The submitted projects also become teaching tools for the entire profession and contribute to the greater public procurement body of knowledge. They provide an opportunity for others to learn from the examples and experiences of state procurement entities and represent an essential step toward identifying potential best practices.

On Wednesday, September 11th, NASPO’s Annual Conference concluded with its perennial Awards Gala in Indianapolis, Indiana, where this year’s winners were announced.

Now that you’re up to speed, let’s look at the impressive and impactful projects that have taken home this year’s honors.

 

Finalist:  Colorado – Whose Contract is it Anyway?  Improving Outcomes Through Contract Management Training for Program Staff in Colorado

Presented with a need to clarify contract management responsibilities across multiple decentralized offices and agencies, Colorado’s State Purchasing and Contracts Office deployed a new flexible approach to training. They developed a program around core contract management principles, then collaborated with each agency to tailor the training format and curriculum to best meet specifically identified needs. This new approach included formalizing reporting and training requirements. With an emphasis on the roles of both procurement and agency officials in contract management, the training has clarified expectations and improved consistency among agencies. Through dedicated program support and multi-channel engagement, agencies and institutions of higher education are better equipped to manage their contracts effectively.

 

Finalist:  Missouri – Operational Improvement Through Turnaround Time Management

Missouri’s Division of Purchasing examined its entire procurement process to identify critical operation metrics and potential bottlenecks. Looking at the time required to execute each phase of their process, the purchasing office benchmarked turnaround times and established detailed goals. This more precise, data-driven approach to continuous process improvement included adopting two readily available software products that analyze performance data and express real-time results via dashboards. Quick access to live performance metrics facilitates effective decision-making and the early discovery of potential issues. Missouri created a culture of transparency, improvement, and customer satisfaction using the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) innovation cycle.

 

Bronze:  Massachusetts – Decarbonizing Massachusetts’ Vendors: An Integration of Climate Consideration into Public Procurement Supply Chain

Massachusetts’s Operational Services Division (OSD) created and empowered a Climate and Sustainability Unit within their procurement office as part of administration-wide efforts to reduce government carbon emissions. This new unit developed and implemented standardized data gathering and evaluation tools to benchmark the state’s suppliers’ emissions contributions and track and incentivize their efforts to improve sustainability. These tools included a Post-Award Climate Form for suppliers to report sustainability-related data and a Climate Vendor Scorecard that OSD uses to evaluate vendor sustainability efforts consistently and transparently. Keeping the unit and its evaluation processes in-house enables OSD to monitor the climate impacts of procurement, incentivize its suppliers to improve their own efforts, and grow the green economy.

 

Silver:  Michigan – Enhancing Vendor Compliance Through RMIS Integration

Burdened by the manual processes of monitoring insurance coverage, Michigan’s Central Procurement Services – Enterprise Risk Management team implemented an automated Risk Management Information System (RMIS) to ensure that suppliers’ certificates of insurance met their contractual requirements. The RMIS uses supplier profiles that track the types and limits of coverage required for their awarded contracts against their submitted certificates of insurance. It generates proactive alerts and notifications of inadequate or expiring coverage, sending automatic communication to suppliers with instructions for compliance. RMIS represents another step towards digital transformation, making processes more efficient and effective, reducing potential risk to the state, and enabling data analysis and reporting for improved supplier management.

 

Gold:  Michigan – Cloudy with a Chance of Savings: Infrastructure as a Service

Michigan’s Central Procurement Services engaged in extensive concurrent negotiations with the largest cloud services providers to implement consistent, preferable terms and conditions for the state’s cloud hosting needs. By engaging the providers simultaneously, procurement officials were able to leverage the competition to produce two optimized direct contracts. This approach avoids the confusion of varying terms and conditions between suppliers while increasing the competition for the state’s hosting opportunities, producing significant discounts, and reducing risk. By offering cloud infrastructure as a service, customers can select the supplier of best-fit for their projects quickly and efficiently without negotiating new terms, saving valuable time and resources.

 

If this has inspired you, it’s never too early to start developing a submission for next year’s awards. Any NASPO state member can write a submission using the official template and submit it for the awards. You just need your CPO’s (NASPO Primary Member) approval before submitting. You can learn more about the scoring process and criteria, past winners, and view past submissions on NASPO’s Cronin Awards page. So, start brainstorming now and maybe we will see you on stage at next year’s Awards.