Report 2009-114 Recommendation 2 Responses

Report 2009-114: Department of General Services: It No Longer Strategically Sources Contracts and Has Not Assessed Their Impact on Small Businesses and Disabled Veteran Business Enterprises (Release Date: July 2010)

Recommendation #2 To: General Services, Department of

To ensure that it maximizes the savings to the State for future purchases, General Services should follow the procedures for identifying strategic sourcing opportunities included in the IAU's procedures manual. To ensure that it is effectively identifying new strategic sourcing opportunities, General Services should work to obtain comprehensive and accurate data on the specific items that state agencies are purchasing, including exploring options for obtaining such data for agencies that do not have enterprise-wide systems and therefore would not be using the additional functionality of the eProcurement system. Until it obtains such data, General Services should work with state agencies to identify detailed purchases for categories that it identifies through the State Contract and Procurement Registration System (SCPRS) as viable opportunities for strategically sourcing. For example, if based on its review of SCPRS data, General Services identifies a particular category that it believes is a good candidate for strategic sourcing, it should work with those state agencies that accounted for the most purchases within the category to determine the types and volume of specific goods purchased to further analyze the types of goods to strategically source. General Services should assess any need for additional resources based on the savings it expects to achieve.

Annual Follow-Up Agency Response From September 2012

At the time of our previous update in November 2011, the last remaining portion of this recommendation to be fully implemented was the analysis of sourcing opportunities based on the Procurement Division's (PD) quarterly review of information obtained from the eSCPRS acquisition data base. In November 2011, the PD assigned staff to review available data on potential sourcing opportunities, i.e., to review for opportunities to establish a new statewide contract for a commodity/service. Based on that review, two categories of information technology products were selected for the performance of a high level analysis to discover the potential of creating a sourced solicitation for those goods. The two categories of information technology products are: (1) Fixed Network Equipment and Components and, (2) Network Service Equipment.

California State Auditor's Assessment of Annual Follow-Up Status: Fully Implemented

All Recommendations in 2009-114

Agency responses received after June 2013 are posted verbatim.