Georgia's progressive procurement

Before Georgia's recent procurement of facility maintenance services, state agencies maintained the equipment in their facilities with three different types of workforces. The Department of Corrections (DOC) maintained its facilities using an entirely in-sourced workforce, consisting of DOC employees and supervised inmates. On the other extreme, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) completely outsourced maintenance of its facilities. The Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) had a hybrid approach with 70 percent of the maintenance work performed by contractors and a handful of employees performing the remaining work.

The strategy of the Georgia Department of Administrative Services (DOAS) was to combine the spend of these three agencies to build a critical mass of volume that would drive more aggressive rates. "We thought we should start with a few substantial agencies and then allow others to join," says Darryl Mitchell, group category manager, infrastructure, who led the facility maintenance procurement effort. GBI and DJJ had nearly simultaneously asked DOAS to conduct maintenance procurements for them, so it made sense to combine those two requirements into a larger procurement in order to leverage the increased spend. It then made sense to approach DOC to encourage them to participate in the procurement.

While it may have been a no-brainer to combine their volumes, as anyone who has conducted a multiagency bid for complex services will tell you, it rarely is that easy. The same was true in Georgia. "Each agency thought it was unique and was at first resistant to combine the contract," says Mitchell. There was some truth to the assertions. Corrections, for example, had to be particularly restrictive in the type of access it gave outside contractors because of the heightened security levels. But the other agencies were unwilling to pay a premium for additional costs that suppliers would incur working in a prison environment. Furthermore, given the younger demographic of its population, the DJJ was more prone to damage by vandalism than the other agencies.

Mitchell and Terry Doumkos, director of strategic sourcing at DOAS, knew that if the procurement was to be successful, it had to be multiagency, and these issues could not become deal-breakers. Achieving compromise required good procurement skills and good communications skills. To ensure that the other agencies did not pay more because of Corrections' security requirements, DOAS added additional line items in the RFP for special security requirements in order that base rates for other agencies were not impacted.

Identifying agency commonalities

Once the three agencies were on board, DOAS built a working group for the procurement, which ultimately became the evaluation committee. The team met several times with the commissioners of the three agencies to answer their questions, address concerns and to get a commitment of resources. Each agency was asked to lend one or two subject-matter experts — typically maintenance managers or engineers — to the working group. Since this was Corrections' first procurement of maintenance services, representatives from DOC's procurement staff also participated.

Once the team was in place and the agency heads were on board, Mitchell and his working group began developing a scope of services. "We first wanted to identify commonalities across the agencies. Then we looked at unique requirements and how to make them agreeable across all the participating agencies," says Mitchell. "Each agency had its scope of services from previous solicitations. We tried to make each item something that everyone could live with. For example, in setting service levels for our HVAC equipment, we had to get everyone to agree on a common specification, like the amount of time that suppliers had to respond or the engineering and maintenance standards," Mitchell says. In general, Mitchell and his team tried to get the agencies to agree to loosen their strictest requirements, without compromising critical operations, to allow a more attainable service level that would be less costly for a supplier to meet.

Doumkos credits Mitchell for the leadership role he played in getting relatively autonomous agencies with very different business models to work together. "Darryl did an excellent job of building consensus and buy-in," says Doumkos.

One key to Georgia's success in this procurement was an open dialog with industry. They asked the private sector how various requirements would impact the costs associated with the procurement, which resulted in a marked improvement in the RFP and to the overall best solution for the agencies.