PIE accomplishments:

Improved the bidding and solicitation process:

• Unbundled contracts, which breaks them into smaller sizes by geographic or other categories for certain goods small businesses provide. To date, we’ve unbundled 20 of 30 solicitations.
• Lengthened each solicitation from 30 to 45 days to give small businesses more time to submit bids.
• Required pre-bid conferences for every solicitation to give vendors an opportunity to understand and ask questions about the solicitation.
• Post apparent successful bids on our website to provide transparency to vendors as research for future opportunities.

Added support and training:

• Every procurement agent in state government is required to attend contract and equity training.
• We partnered with Washington Procurement Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) and Tabor 100 to help businesses, at no charge, learn how to succeed in the proposal process and manage contracts with the state and other governments.
• We seek out small and diverse firms that aren’t yet doing business with the state and ask our current vendors how we can better support them.

Established Business Diversity Advisory Group (BDAG):

• We ask for feedback from advisory group members to help us improve our service processes and policies.
• Advisory group members recommend ideas and strategies to create pilot programs, improve our strategies and improve our transparency.

The annual PIE accomplishments report details what we’ve done so far.

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