Mohave eNewsletter - March 2008
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From Outreach and Education...
For the past four months, I have been traveling the state and talking to a great many of our members and vendors about their needs and how we might serve them better. While doing so, I have discovered several recurring themes. First, many of our members are not fully aware of all of the Mohave contracts that are available for their use. This was such a big issue that we at Mohave decided to use “Mohave Contracts: The Missing Piece” as our outreach theme for this year. Many times, Mohave has a contract that you weren’t aware that was on a Cooperative Purchasing Bid. Also, we have been trying to make it easier to look at all of our contracts, we recently created an additional way to view our contracts, we created two summary lists. One is by product/service type and one is by vendor name. They are available from our website Purchasing Services page as downloads at http://www.mesc.org/downloads/contracts_product_service.pdf and http://www.mesc.org/downloads/contracts_vendor.pdf. We are also revamping our website to offer a more user-friendly “Contract Finder” search. Second, many of our members and vendors are sometimes reluctant to call us for help. There are some really great folks working in the business offices, purchasing departments, other areas in our school, cities, and towns (and in our vendor organizations) and for the most part they try to do their job while trying not to bother other folks who they think are as busy as they are. Sometimes a simple call or email to one of us here at Mohave will save you countless hours of debate and/or work that does not add value to the process. We are here for you. And finally, there are a great number of purchasing professionals out there that are doing a never ending job of trying to get the greatest value for their organizations purchasing dollar. To aid in this area, we have added a Mohave Contract Pricing page to our website. You can get all the current contract pricing from our vendors on our online website. You need only apply for a member user ID and password. MESC has also committed great time and resources to providing more educational and training opportunities from the Mohave staff and our partners. We have started an annual study of purchasing, we are actively working with state professional purchasing organizations to bring additional benchmarking and training to public purchasers, and we have developed new training classes in areas such as Job Order Contracting and Due Diligence. We do these things because we are a professional group that wants to expand the professional knowledge of all. In the end, please know that Mohave is committed to you our members and our vendors. Each day we ask the question, “How can we better serve our members and vendors?” To help answer this question, Mohave has been carefully crafting several surveys that will be coming out in the next couple of weeks. Please help us help you by responding as appropriate to these surveys, and don’t be afraid to tell us how it is. Have a great month! And, don’t forget to mark your calendars for Wednesday, October 1, 2008, for Mohave Expo 2008 (at Mesa Convention Center and Phoenix-Mesa Marriott Hotel)! Mark
A. Kinsey |