New buying method changes shoppers' job descriptions

The government's shoppers-those who buy everything from computers to guns for federal agencies-recently have gotten a lot more responsibility.

As strategic sourcing, a buying method under which contracts are centralized in the hopes of negotiating better deals, picks up steam across government agencies, employees who formerly processed small purchase orders are now in charge of negotiating contracts and combining purchases that formerly were made separately. The decline in busywork and increase in strategic thinking has left many workers pleased.

"I never enjoyed my job so much or had so much fun," said Craig Partridge, manager of supply chain management strategies at the Postal Service. Instead of doing repetitive transactions, he said, he and his team engage in more high-level thinking.

In addition, the Food and Drug Administration, which is in the midst of consolidating contracts for supplies and services such as animal husbandry, has increased expectations for its acquisitions staff.

"To put them to work only on simplified acquisitions, which involve a more pedestrian type of work, is shortchanging them, and shortchanging the agency in terms of what we should expect from our workforce," said Gregory Doyle, chief of FDA's Office of Shared Services.

The strategy shift can put immense stress on procurement personnel, said Reid Jackson, a senior associate at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton who has worked with federal agencies on strategic sourcing.

"When you have a workforce that's been doing the same processing… for 20 years, talking about adding to that with strategic sourcing can be intimidating," he said. Much of the federal acquisition workforce is close to retirement, he said, making the need for new training particularly stressful.

At the same time, most acquisition experts agree that strategic sourcing can help solve the government's difficulty in maintaining a qualified acquisition workforce. "Strategic sourcing will reduce workload by replacing hundreds of little buys with big ones so it will free up an understaffed workforce to focus on more mission critical buys," said Bob Welch, a partner at Acquisition Solutions Inc., which consults with agencies on strategic sourcing.

Most procurement offices currently have only 70 percent of their authorized staffing levels, he said.

In 2002, the Government Accountability Office reported that agencies were facing an impending crisis on their acquisition teams because there were too few workers to go around. It also found that strategic sourcing reduced the number of workers needed to work on procurement issues in the private sector, and the same might happen in the public sector, said Carolyn Kirby, assistant director on GAO's acquisition and sourcing management team.

"This might be another opportunity to address the squeeze on the workforce," she said.

When the Postal Service started focusing on strategic sourcing four years ago, its acquisition workforce clocked in at 1,013. Now, because the work has been streamlined, that number has shrunk to 660. Partridge attributed the decline to attrition. The Postal Service is still short of workers: Ideally, it needs 700 employees on the acquisition team, Partridge said.

GAO also found strategic sourcing has led private companies to hire more professionals with advanced degrees, such as masters in business administration, as well as those with financial backgrounds, foreshadowing a similar impact on federal agencies.

"[Strategic sourcing] is certainly a more business-oriented, strategic way of managing what you spend and how you spend it," said Jackson. "Therefore, certainly people with a business or management background have valuable skills."