Becoming Your Agency's Trusted Advisor

How often have you heard procurement described as the “department of no”?

To your internal clients—who want their goods and services purchased yesterday—the systems and processes you’ve put in place to ensure a fair and transparent process sometimes just look like red tape.

But forward-thinking purchasing teams, like the one at San Bernardino County, are changing the narrative.

In this episode, we sat down with Michelle Churchill and Bruce Cole, Supervising Buyers at San Bernardino County.

At over 20,000 employees, Michelle and Bruce serve a huge internal client base. And they’ve made it their mission to shift their agency’s perspective of procurement, once seen as a roadblock, now established as a trusted and strategic advisor to their organization.

In our conversion, hosted in-person at this year’s NIGP Forum in Boston, Bruce and Michelle tackle topics such as:

• How manual errors and RFP addenda eroded trust with internal clients and vendors
• How procurement technology has freed up the purchasing team’s time to get out of the weeds and think more strategically
• The importance of user-friendly software to ensure buy-in from evaluators and vendors

Connect with Bruce at bcole@pur.sbcounty.gov and Michelle at Michelle.Churchill@pur.sbcounty.gov.

You can find this interview, and many more, by subscribing to Inside Public Procurement on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or gobonfire.com/podcast.

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