The Government Accountability Office released a report today detailing how the government is leaving at least $50 billion on the table annually by not taking advantage of strategic sourcing — “a process that moves an organization away from numerous individual procurements to a broader aggregate approach,” according to the report.
The federal government spends roughly $537 billion on federal procurement spending each year, yet just a small fraction of that is managed with strategic sourcing efforts. Four agencies — Defense, Homeland Security, Energy and Veterans Affairs — manage 80 percent of the overall procurement budget, but only 5 percent of their spending is managed with strategic sourcing, the report found.
“While strategic sourcing makes good sense and holds the potential to achieve significant savings, federal agencies have been slow to embrace it, even in a time of great fiscal pressure,” the report reads.
The basic idea behind the Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative — launched in 2005 — is collaboration among the agencies: collaboration to bargain for the best price on contracts and collaboration to share best purchasing practices. But the initiative was only applied to a small amount of federal procurement spending in 2011, according to the report.
Keep reading this article at: http://fedscoop.com/gao-government-could-save-50-billion-through-strategic-sourcing/
