It may sound quaint and old fashioned to some, but for state procurement officials, purchasing radios is a current and vexing problem.
State entities use radios and radio networks today for many reasons, including critical emergency services, expending millions of taxpayer dollars annually to procure radio technologies.
Even in the modern age of cell phones and social networks, you wouldn’t want a firefighter texting the stationhouse if you were involved in some type of emergency.
However, buying radios and the associated equipment is a challenge for procurement departments, who must balance the needs and wants of the users—police, fire and transportation, to name a few—and the complexity of the products against the ever-present need to keep costs as low as possible.
This is exactly the situation the state of Tennessee’s Central Procurement Office found itself in several years ago, when it had multiple, short-term contracts for various types of radios and maintenance agreements at fixed, and potentially non-competitive prices. Making matters worse, the contracts were limited and generally unable to keep pace with the dynamic radio market.
So, Tennessee officials created a new procurement process for radios that included several areas of innovation.
Keep reading this article at: http://www.routefifty.com/management/2017/05/radio-procurement-tennessee/138139/
