When a California law enforcement agency needed a gun safe a while back, it called a local provider it had dealt with before and got a quote for $2,338. The item arrived, was professionally and competently installed and the agency was happy. A few months later, a second California agency bought two of the same safes from the same vendor and paid $2,775 for each safe—that is, it placed twice the order and still paid 19% more per item.
We know these numbers because we have an advantage that your agency can have as well: we’ve started to use SmartProcure, which a friend of ours recently described as a “legal corporate espionage platform.” The brainchild of Jeff Rubenstein (former CEO of Advanced Public Safety), SmartProcure automates public records requests surrounding government spending on a line-item basis. Pulling this information together, the program allows government agencies to search through the database of items in a number of useful ways: by description (e.g., “Chair”), vendor, purchasing agency, city or even by PO number.
SmartProcure is a web application that, after some walkthrough and training videos, allows even non-engineering types to mine procurement records like a pro to see what everyone is paying for, well, everything.
This means even the smallest police department can find out what other police departments in the area have paid for every single item they buy, and see what each vendor is charging each department.
The concepts are not unique: there are several bidding and procurement databases out there, including Onvia and Deltek, though there is a vastly disproportionate availability of bidding information versus actually procured cost records.
SmartProcure innovates in its ease of use and time to insight.
“We respond to customers looking to compare us to those RFP vendors, but we capture 81.5% of purchases without an RFP or bid, “ said Rubenstein, who says his product complements those other products. “It's never a good thing for a vendor to be over- or under-priced with its product, and our information may give a huge competitive advantage when responding to RFPs.” With SmartProcure, both buyer and seller have full access to pricing information for everything bought since 2008.
Put another way, your ability to negotiate just got as good as that of the smartest agency in your ecosystem.
We should mention one more crucial detail: SmartProcure is free to the government. It makes money charging vendors that sell to the government in exchange for agency purchasing histories. This is the “legal corporate espionage” part.
Dave and I recently met Rubenstein and some of his team in San Francisco, where both SmartProcure (and Dave’s and my venture, StreetCred Software) traveled after being selected to participate in the Code for America Accelerator Class of 2013. CfA is a not-for-profit that creates applications for cities across the country, and it also runs a business accelerator that seeks to help for-profit companies like ours that are in the business of making technology for a more efficent government.
First Thoughts
The first thing we thought when we (as cops) saw SmartProcure was, "I’ll never pay too much for anything again." That is, if I want to buy some police patches to express our new tactical-with-a-heart theme, I can go into SmartProcure and search for a range of things—from “patches” and “uniforms” to the names of five of the nearest cities—and quickly get a list of the vendors who are selling and what they charge.
It gives our agency the ability to see which vendors are charging the least, but it also gives us a list of key contacts at each agency so we can call them about their experience with a particular vendor.
This kind of transparency was exactly what was envisioned by the creation of The Freedom of Information Act: it levels the playing field and prevents both obfuscation of pricing and availability by vendors and failure on the part of the agencies to share buying and product data.
Training your company to make the tool a part of your agency’s procurement workflow in an important step. Again, SmartProcure is free, so we’re perfectly fine giving them a plug here.
The Free Problem
While several products (including at least one we’ve written about here) have started out as “Free to law enforcement,” only to later change the terms and conditions associated with that offer, we think that the risk is somewhat lower here.
It’s an important distinction that it is not just free to law enforcement, it’s free to all government. That’s part of SmartProcure’s core business model: it sells to vendors interested in finding new sales leads and to keep the paying vendors interested, SmartProcure must deliver the goods—in this case regularly updated, complete government records. This is an easily understandable business model, unlike some of the others we’ve dealt with, which hoped to later upsell against “free.”
We look at it as enlightened self-interest: SmartProcure is dependent on government to provide the FOIA requests SmartProdure needs to maintain a viable product.
And we can tell you that, even though we get it free at the PD, Dave and I have spent the money to buy SmartProcure as a vendor company because, frankly, it’s absolutely essential that we get this kind of intelligence.
That fact (Dave and I, you understand, are pretty darned cheap) is enough to convince us that the model SmartProcure is following is one that is sustainable.
Disclaimer: While the authors’ company is a paying customer of SmartProcure services, neither they nor their company, StreetCred Software, have been remunerated in any way for this coverage.
