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Baltimore procurement bureau says backlogs are shrinking as it adopts team model and supplemental tracking
Summary
Procurement leaders said backlog and requisition counts have fallen after staff increases, process redesign and use of monday.com as a supplement to Workday; council members requested rubrics and asked to add change-order tracking to procurement metrics.
Baltimore’s Bureau of Procurement told the Budget & Appropriations Committee it has substantially reduced outstanding requisitions and is shifting to a team-based model that assigns procurement officers to specific departments.
Chief Procurement Officer Adam Manny said the bureau has restructured to allow procurement teams to learn department business cycles, increased staff training and national certification efforts, and brought key business partners into the procurement cycle earlier (including the Small, Minority & Women-Owned Business Enterprise office and wage/labor reviewers). Manny described using monday.com as a lightweight project-management layer to capture qualitative workflow details (who is working on a requisition, status notes, attached files) that are difficult to pull quickly from Workday, while asserting Workday remains the secure transactional system.
Moxton and Manny reported measurable improvements: outstanding requisitions fell from 515 (January 2023) to 138 (April, most recent quarter reported), and average caseload per procurement officer dropped significantly (to roughly 22 outstanding items per officer). The bureau said it now routes BBMR review earlier for procurements with values of $25,000 and above.
Council members pressed on recurring procurement issues: low bid counts on some solicitations (FY24 averaged about two bids; target is five), whether best-value RFPs will increase competition, and how change orders are tracked. Manny said best-value solicitations typically yield better responses but can take longer; change orders are captured per project in Workday but are not yet aggregated citywide. The bureau agreed to provide a template/rubric used to score best-value solicitations and said it will explore whether Workday can be configured to aggregate change-order data; the council requested adding change-order tracking to procurement performance metrics.
What’s next: Procurement will provide the council with its scoring template/rubric and follow up on feasibility of system-wide change-order reporting. The bureau said it will continue pursuing process and technology improvements to reduce procurement cycle times.
