The Obama administration’s efforts to streamline federal purchasing have included something called category management—essentially organizing products into groupings that can be managed more efficiently as business units to maximize savings.
That approach was inspired by a similar program in place in the United Kingdom. But Anne Rung, administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, said on Tuesday there are important differences between the two governments that make direct comparisons difficult. The U.K. government “is smaller than us, they hired full-time category managers and got permission to pay extremely high salaries to run a centralized buying shop,” she said at the 2016 acquisition conference of the American Council for Technology-Industry Advisory Council.
Launched a year ago, the U.S. government’s category management effort is run by an interagency council, which now has chief executives for 10 categories of common agency purchases and an online portal being used by 6,500 federal purchasing employees, Rung said. With $2 billion in savings and a reduction in the total number of contracts, “it’s driving greater efficiency in the $10 billion spent each year on personal computers, software and mobile devices.”
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