Ronald Flom

Office of Personnel Management
Ronald Flom
Deputy Associate Director for Contracting Facilities and Administrative Services

Ronald Flom retired from a 29-year Army career to accept a challenging post at a civilian agency: In late 2003, he became the Office of Personnel Management's procurement executive.

There he inherited a decentralized procurement operation held together by a headquarters staff of seven-the remnants of a major downsizing in the 1990s. "One of my charges when I came here was to centralize procurement," he says. That required replenishing headquarters staff. He brought in 12 people, and with a couple of retirements, now has a staff of 17.

With the exception of some smaller buys at field offices, headquarters once again does most of OPM's shopping. Flom also has reduced the number of purchase cardholders at the agency by 30 percent as part of an effort to exercise tighter control over spending.

Training also ranks high on Flom's list of priorities. Online courses have helped him cut costs. OPM doesn't yet have a formal program to certify procurement professionals, but Flom has fashioned basic coursework requirements around those at the Defense Department, which he knows intimately because he ended his Pentagon career as commandant of the Defense Acquisition University, a training institute at Fort Belvoir, Va.

He also has made strides on the Office of Management and Budget's governmentwide procurement initiatives. He has used strategic sourcing-a technique to leverage the government's buying power for bulk purchases-to negotiate better deals.

Flom boasts a top mark-a green light-for competitive sourcing on OMB's quarterly management score card. Success in this area can come at the expense of federal employees' jobs, but in Flom's case, OPM's in-house teams won all but two of 15 competitions by finding ways to perform work more efficiently.