In-state company gets the contract

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After a series of site visits, oral presentations and best-and-final offers, the state awarded the contract to Carter Goble Lee (CGL) Engineering, an Alpharetta, Ga.-based firm that specializes in facility maintenance. While CGL is an in-state company, its footprint is international. It has performed planning, project maintenance and facility maintenance work in 13 countries and 49 states. It also has a long history in providing agency-wide services like the type DOAS was asking for in its RFP.

CGL's President Joe Lee described Georgia's solicitation as "one of the more progressive procurements I have seen in my career in any state in the country."

Lee continues, "The state recognized that it wasn't just a low-cost bid or buying widgets. It recognized that facility maintenance needed to be professionalized. In order to protect the public's investment in the public infrastructure, there needed to be a professional approach to maintaining that infrastructure. The state recognized that it needed a systematic approach that included both a preventive maintenance and a corrective maintenance program."

Lee pointed to the way the state asked suppliers to think about how the contract would be staffed as a particularly innovative approach. While the RFP did ask suppliers to provide a specific number of technicians at each facility, it also encouraged suppliers to think creatively about ways to leverage staff across multiple facilities in a regional approach.

It presented an interesting challenge for suppliers like CGL. On the one hand, to offer the most cost-effective solution, it behooved them to spread staff resources across as many facilities as possible. On the other, it had to meet SLAs that mandated fairly rapid response times, so it could not afford to cut corners. To add another layer of complexity to the staffing levels, the technicians had to be able to service a wide array of equipment, requiring many different skills. Lastly, the facilities varied in age from turn of the century to those built in the modern day. Finding the right balance was an enormous challenge, but one that Lee felt his firm was well prepared for.

"We compared our own experience with facility maintenance across the United States. We had to make sure we were doing it the right way. You had to break it down to how many man-hours you thought it would take to maintain the equipment in the building," says Lee. "One reason I believe we won is that we had historical data from our work with other governments about what it would take to maintain these buildings." This data allowed CGL to predict the appropriate staffing levels and to find that critical balance.

Doumkos believes that in changing the paradigm, state procurement has positively affected the way the state takes care of its facilities and the equipment within those buildings. "Our pricing is very aggressive because we aggregated our volumes. We have shown that you can outsource services, achieve a savings and place less [of a] burden on your staff. We can achieve the same or higher levels of service with fewer resources because those resources bring a more specialized skill set. By enhancing our service, we can make the equipment last a lot longer, which could be the greatest cost savings for the state."

• Read the "Building 'A New Georgia'" sidebar for more information on Georgia's success with strategic sourcing after the consultants left.

About the author

David Yarkin, former deputy secretary for procurement in Pennsylvania's Department of General Services, is president of Government Sourcing Solutions, headquartered in Washington, D.C. Contact Yarkin via e-mail at dyarkin@govsourcing.com.