Out of Sight: Building a Procurement Function in Small Governments

For many small organizations, there is no official procurement department and having staff dedicated to procurement functions like coordinating requests for proposals (RFPs), managing vendor relationships, issuing purchase order (POs), managing contracts, and ensuring compliance with state, federal, or grantor purchase requirements is not realistic. However, the procurement responsibilities for small governments are not all that different than those of their larger peers. In this session, speakers will explain how to establish an effective procurement function in a small government and how to integrate purchasing and finance responsibilities while still maintaining focus on each. Speakers will also discuss strategies for using your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system more effectively and policy and process considerations for modern procurement functions.