Procurement in 1/3 the Time

Lauren Dodge
Jul 1
2 min read

When you can’t get $175M out the door...

Last year, Pierce County Human Services (PCHS) faced a growing problem.

Contracts were piling up, approvals were taking too long, and funding delays were forcing providers to dip into their reserves or, worse, to keep programs running. Pierce received $175 million in ARPA money, but they couldn't deploy the services needed into the community because of the constraints of their procurement process.

Providers were waiting months—sometimes over a year—for finalized contracts. Meanwhile, the staff managing these contracts did everything they could to move things along, but the process worked against them.

This system wasn’t just slowing down employees. Pierce County was at risk of losing community providers who struggled to operate without stable, predictable county funding.

What They Did

With the help of Partners in Public Innovation, a 17-member interdisciplinary improvement team of County staff and community grantees trained together in Lean 101, mapped the current state process, identified pain points and bottlenecks, and then designed a more efficient future state for the Human Services procurement process. From these sessions, they identified process improvements that could be made immediately and mapped an implementation timeline for ongoing improvements.

Innovation Highlights

The PCHS improvement team found solutions that could be implemented immediately to create significant time savings across the procurement process:

1. Concurrent approvals cuts months of timeline

Moving to concurrent approvals reduces the procurement timeline by 6 months. Framing also plays a key role: setting a fixed due date for reviews is more effective than requiring all approvals before the document advances.

2. Increased quality = Less need for oversight

Errors triggered increased scrutiny from Council, which in turn added months to project timelines. By updating and aligning standards across divisions, HS can improve consistency. Consistent training helps prevent errors, allowing more items to move through on the consent calendar. This will reduce the approval process from 3+ months down to 1.5 months.

3. Execute contract the day after it’s awarded

Human Services typically waited for official approval before engaging vendors, negotiating terms, or addressing insurance—despite vendors already being publicly recommended for award. The team found that starting negotiations at the recommendation stage would cut 1 month off of the process.

4. Providers should work with one County, not five departments

The contracting process involved multiple stakeholders who often second-guessed each other and gave conflicting information to providers. To break down silos and operate as a unified County, the team designated a human services liaison to Council, established regular resource-sharing among the eight human services program teams, and launched recurring insurance meetings with Risk. The Risk meetings alone condense weeks of emailing back and forth for multiple contracts and into a single 2 hour meeting.

Results

The improvement team presented solutions to Council and the County Executive that would cut in half the time to get a contract executed. Initial changes were made immediately, and full implementation is underway.