If you are like most public entities in Canada, your team is stretched thin these days. Difficulty replacing retiring expertise, uncertainties in your supply chain, and increasing expectations around emerging technology are just a few of the contributing factors.
Group Purchasing Organizations like Kinetic GPO offer aggregated volume pricing for fully compliant and thoroughly vetted contracts that have already been established. GPO membership is free and the process to access these contracts is simple. Let’s look at some of the key benefits of augmenting your procurement resources with GPOs like Kinetic GPO.
Reduce Compliance Concerns
Kinetic GPO has done the heavy lifting for your team by engaging Canadian compliance, legal and contract experts to ensure its contracts are established through a fair, open and transparent competitive bid process as required by the Trade Agreements. You can rest assured that public procurement compliance requirements have been meticulously followed so that your team can focus on selecting the GPO vendor that truly provides the best value for the procurement under consideration.
Shorten Time to Contract
Every procurement professional has fielded complaints over how long the process takes from identification of a need to ‘boots on the ground.’ By taking the time-consuming and high-risk procurement process off the plate for your team, you are removing a major obstacle to timely goods and services delivery to your internal and external clients. This goes a long way towards enhancing the reputation of procurement and increasing confidence in the value that your procurement team brings to the organization.
Reducing the time to access a contractor can be of particular benefit in an urgent situation such as if a municipal lamp standard is damaged creating a safety issue, or the integrity of the roof membrane on a school is suddenly breached. In cases like these your organization’s ability to immediately call up a pre-vetted, experienced, and compliant contractor through a national GPO can be worth its weight in gold.
Access National Expertise
Whether you are a small municipality, First Nations Organization, non-profit, or large provincial government, you will face the challenge of being a ‘small fish in a big pond’ at some point in the procurement journey. Regardless of the size of your organization, it can be difficult to attract competition from major IT solutions providers and large construction firms, for example. Sophisticated national vendors often decline to participate in smaller, one-off RFx processes in favor of broader opportunities - and even if they do respond to your procurement, they will bid a price premium. Each procurement response requires considerable time, effort and resources which can detract from the work they actually do. As with any business, public or private, these companies need to ensure they are maximizing their return on investment. This is one reason that many prefer responding to the large volume and efficient competitive bid processes that result in multiple awards to a single contract through GPOs. One process can result in a steady stream of individual projects with associated revenue.
Another crucial point to keep in mind is that accessing expertise through GPO contracts does not exclude the opportunity to collaborate with local contractors. In many cases, GPOs create pathways that smaller suppliers could not access on their own. National contracts often include pre-vetted local contractors to act as subcontractors for various portions of project delivery. These are opportunities to participate in large projects and to build business connections that the smaller local companies could not have otherwise accessed. Local suppliers can also respond directly to GPO solicitations and indicate their geographic services areas, which is another avenue for expanding opportunity for local businesses while helping them build their capacity and experience.
Leverage Volume Pricing
This is an easy benefit to understand and one that significantly bolsters the business case for using GPOs like Kinetic GPO. While price is not always the most significant criteria in procurement, it is the most visible and one that is usually tracked closely by taxpayers and auditors alike. GPO members benefit from pre-negotiated national-scale pricing from pre-vetted, experienced, and fully compliant contractors who have already competed on price.
Free up Your Team
As noted, procurement teams are stretched thin these days. It is therefore critical to think about how best to support them and augment their resources and streamline processes. When folks are chronically overloaded and overwhelmed, mistakes happen and burn-out begins to set in. By enabling direct access to GPO contracts through Kinetic you can eliminate the need for routine, recurring and often repetitive procurements such as office and IT supplies, janitorial services, and ongoing building maintenance requirements. This frees up your ‘procurement rock stars’ to focus on the emerging and more exciting procurement developments such as the increasing incorporation of AI, and use of new innovative construction delivery methods. The opportunity to keep learning and growing will help ensure your team feels supported, valued, and fully engaged, resulting in higher job satisfaction and retention.
Conclusions
While these are just some of the reasons to consider accessing the value presented by GPO contracts, keep in mind that not all GPOs are the same. Kinetic GPO collaborates closely with awarded suppliers to provide training, business reviews, and ongoing engagement throughout the contract delivery lifecycle. Kinetic GPO’s number one goal is to ensure its members continue to receive the absolute best value and can often assist with resolving any contract management issues that may arise during delivery.
With the CFTA explicitly allowing for the use of buying groups, procurement would be remiss not to explore adding GPOs to their menu of sourcing options.
When adding GPO contracts to your team’s procurement toolkit, make sure you ask about how the GPO delivers these benefits and will assist you to find the right fit for your organization. The process should be simple, accessible, and fully transparent.
