We understand purchasing’s challenges from 150 years running large complex procurement offices. And our tech team has spent their careers solving similarly complex business challenges.
Our story begins in Harrisburg, the state capital of Pennsylvania on the banks of the Susquehanna River.
David Yarkin, the state’s chief procurement officer, encountered a challenge that had confounded procurement officials for decades and still does today. How do governments and educational institutions really understand the past performance of their prospective suppliers if their only data points are the cherry-picked references they provide? How many times were governments picking suppliers with questionable performance history simply because they didn’t have access to the supplier’s more objective customers? By picking suppliers without strong track records, what financial, operational and safety risks were we creating? And how could we access more past performance data so we instead could pick only the most qualified suppliers?
At the same time, technology was driving a massive transformation in how consumers make purchasing decisions.
Companies like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Angie’s List were crowdsourcing rating and review data and making it easily accessible through modern applications on desktops and smart phones. By democratizing this data, these tech companies allowed consumers to share information about restaurants, hotels and contractors, helping them make more informed choices in their personal lives. David saw an opportunity to bring this experience-sharing revolution to the way governments and schools select suppliers. In early 2019, he began assembling an all-star team of tech veterans to build a tool as intuitive and powerful as the consumer review platforms.
But picking a critical supplier for a government agency and picking a hotel or burger joint are not the same. At each step of the process in building Procurated, we have relied on the expertise of a team of public procurement advisors who have learned the ins and outs, the nuances, the rules (written and unwritten) through a century and a half at the helm of some of the nation’s largest, most complex governmental and educational procurement organizations. No important decision was made without consulting with these nationally-recognized procurement leaders. Their insights can be found throughout our product and our business.
Born from personal experience, built by a tech-savvy team, and shaped by public procurement expertise:
Because Every Decision Matters.
The relationship between a buyer and supplier is at the heart of public procurement. It’s one that evolves during the lifecycle of a contract. Buyers solicit suppliers. Buyers evaluate a supplier’s bid or RFP response. Suppliers provide services to the buyer’s organization and the buyer tries to maximize the supplier’s performance during the term. And then they do it all over again.
Supplier performance – past, present and future – is a fundamental part of the process at every turn. Data about supplier performance is enormously powerful. But today, it is incomplete, difficult to collect, heavily skewed and tremendously underutilized.
Imagine a world where the supplier who has the actual best track record is awarded the contract every time, where quarterly business reviews are a collaborative exercise in which the buyer can outline for the supplier precisely where they need to improve (which agencies, which component of their value delivery), where agencies compliment central purchasing for their responsiveness and for solving their problems. In this world, all suppliers are able to continuously improve, by leveraging thousands of honest data points from customers. And even the poorest performing suppliers have a roadmap to improve and become elite. Turning this vision into a reality is what drives us. We are committed to building cutting-edge technology to give back to the public servants that serve us.
When the relationship between buyer and supplier has been transformed with both sides using the same data and tools to mutually improve, the ultimate beneficiary is our fellow citizens. Citizens depend on governments. Governments depend on suppliers. And with Procurated, they work together to improve lives. Because every decision matters.
