Template: Get In Focus: Using Stakeholder Focus Groups to Improve Your Procurement Processes

Don’t be afraid to solicit feedback from your colleagues! Analyzing the experience of your purchasing team’s most frequent collaborators (attorneys, customer departments and agencies, city management, finance, etc.) can unearth new ideas and inspire solutions to help you achieve procurement excellence. Surveying these “internal customers” can reveal pain points and inefficiencies in need of urgent fixes and can also provide valuable feedback to your purchasing staff on what they do well. This quick read offers guidance on how to put together an excellent survey, encourage honest feedback from respondents, and use that information to improve the performance of your purchasing office.

One effective tool for understanding vendor perspectives on your procurement process is a vendor survey. In this how-to guide, you will understand how hearing from both current and prospective vendors can provide valuable feedback on your procurement process, learn how to design and implement a vendor survey, and read about concrete examples and promising practices in survey implementation across different governments.