No Single Source of Truth

The County cannot find accurate contract information in a timely manner. This hinders the County Executive’s Office in decision making, prevents procurement cooperation that could save money, and unnecessarily wastes many hours of effort. Response to Finding 1 The County agrees with the finding.

The County saves multiple, sometimes inconsistent, copies of contract information on department storage devices and multiple procurement systems. This makes it difficult for the County to find accurate, up-to- date, information. Response to Finding 2 The County agrees with the finding.

Due to the absence of a uniform contract search system, County departments are not able to learn if other departments already have contracts that are relevant to their needs and, thus, are not able to take advantage of cooperative opportunities. Further, if the County had a publicly accessible contract-search system, other government entities could use that resource to partner with the County on cooperative procurement opportunities to the benefit of the County. Response to Finding 3 The County partially disagrees with the finding. While the County does not have a uniform contract search system for professional services contracts managed by departments, County departments do have visibility to all Countywide contracts for goods and related services via the internal County Procurement SharePoint site and contracts reports. Work is ongoing to simplify the comprehensive contract reports and have contracts information and search more transparent for County departments. Departments are also able to identify and take advantage of existing agreements via communication and support from the County Decentralized Procurement Division and Office of Countywide Contracting Management (OCCM), which was recently integrated within the Procurement Department. In addition, the centralized procurement and management of contracts for goods and related services ensures that the County avoids redundant, unnecessary, or uncoordinated solicitations for these commodities. Moreover, by requiring all departments to report RFPs and Request for Grant Applications (RFGAs) to the Board via the Master Acquisition List, the County reduces inefficiencies in the sourcing and contracting for professional services. While a publicly accessible contract search system would assist other government entities in accessing contracts already established by the County, neighboring jurisdictions may access the report of upcoming solicitations produced for the Board of Supervisors at each meeting to identify potential cooperative sourcing opportunities. The County also intends to implement a formal advance acquisition planning process to further identify opportunities for internal consolidation of solicitations where there are shared needs, as well as potential opportunities to partner with other governmental entities for cooperative purchases.

Multiple departments in the County do not have a department policy for contractor evaluations and do not evaluate contractor performance. This violates the Policy Manual guidelines and could lead to departments making a poor choice of contractor. Response to Finding 4 The County agrees with the finding. Board of Supervisors Policy Manual Section 5.4.5.5—Monitoring, Administration, and Evaluation of Contracts—establishes the minimum requirements for contractor performance management; departments may have additional requirements depending on funding source and other considerations. The County’s hospital system has a required (CMS/Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services Certification) contractor evaluation system with monthly audits. Additionally, the County’s Social Services Agency (SSA) has a robust contract performance monitoring procedure that includes an internal performance monitoring process through review of monthly or quarterly vendor reports, fiscal monitoring, vendor site visits, and corrective actions procedures with technical support provided by the agency. The hospital system and SSA account for a substantial share of the County’s contracts. Several other departments and agencies in the County also have a policy or established process to manage vendor performance, where regulated by law, funding source, or administrative direction; however, there is not a consistent and uniform Countywide contractor evaluation template or contractor performance evaluation process for those departments that lack their own. While there is not a consistent and uniform Countywide contractor evaluation template or contractor performance evaluation process for departments that lack their own, contracting staff will routinely be reminded of Board policy and administrative guidelines requirements to monitor and evaluate vendor performance through procurement and contracting stakeholder groups such as the Procurement Liaison Collaborative (PLC) and the Countywide Contracting Workgroup (CCW).

The County does not have a countywide mechanism to store and share contractor evaluations making it impossible for departments to view other departments’ evaluations. Response to Finding 5 The County agrees with the finding.

Multiple County departments with professional service contracts manage their procurement process using custom spreadsheets instead of using a procurement system. This leads to the County having multiple inconsistent copies of contract data and makes it difficult to measure county-wide procurement performance. Response to Finding 6 The County agrees with the finding.

County departments cannot practically measure procurement contract lead times. The County has no way of determining if a department performing its own procurement consistently fails to establish contracts in a timely manner. Response to Finding 7 The County agrees with the finding.

Most employees engaged in procurement do not know about the County’s procurement performance goals. Response to Finding 8 The County agrees with the finding.

The County does not track procurement performance measures of individual departments involved in procurement. The County cannot evaluate the performance of those individual departments. Response to Finding 9 The County agrees with the finding.

The County does not have a Countywide strategic procurement plan to address the long-standing issues of finding contracts in a timely manner, eliminating data consistency issues, measuring performance, evaluating contractors, and the choice of procurement systems. Response to Finding 10 The County agrees with the finding.

The County has made minimal progress in implementing procurement technology over the last decade because the County failed to make this a priority. Response to Finding 11 The County partially disagrees with the finding. The County deployed core components of a procure-to- pay system (SAP/ARIBA) in 2015/2016. All County departments and agencies currently have access and utilize Ariba to purchase goods and related services; however, the County has not fully deployed select modules (e.g., sourcing, vendor information, and performance management), nor has the County fully configured the system for use in professional services contracting.