The National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) honored three state procurement programs with the George Cronin Awards for Procurement Excellence at its Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado. Nominations were scored based on the criteria of innovation and initiative, transferability, service improvement, and demonstrable cost reduction. Program submissions from Mississippi, Oklahoma and New York received top honors this year.
For Mississippi, this was the first year to be chosen as a Cronin Award winner and they returned home with the title of Gold Award winner. Their winning program was titled Procurement Transformation: Driving Efficiency into Business Operations. Mississippi's determination to create more efficient business operations prompted them to explore the expansion of purchase card usage to school districts. This change in practice put money directly in to the hands of the teachers to use for classrooms while eliminating thousands of man hours typically needed to process purchase orders and checks.
The Silver Cronin Award was presented to Oklahoma for its submission Multi-State Natural Gas Vehicle OEM Contract. A common vision between the governors of Oklahoma and Colorado to procure affordable vehicles that ran on clean natural gas led Oklahoma to take on a cooperative procurement, with the aid of the WSCA-NASPO Cooperative Purchasing Organization, LLC, to promote the use of clean natural gas vehicles by the states at a competitive price. This contract is beginning to shape the market by working with US automobile manufacturers to encourage the use of a domestic energy source that will be sustainable long-term.
New York was named the winner of the Bronze Cronin Award with their submission Hourly Based IT Services. New York State Procurement (NYSPro) created an innovative process to address the need for hourly-based information technology (IT) services by becoming an internally managed service provider for IT services. NYSPro eliminated the need for over 600 individual contracts and now meets the same demand with only 25 vendors while still providing competitive pricing.
The George Cronin Awards for Procurement Excellence are recognized as a premier achievement for innovative public procurement and pay homage to a founder and the first president of NASPO, George J. Cronin. Since 1985, the Cronin Awards have recognized ground-breaking state procurement programs and promoted the sharing of ideas between states.