Welcome to the March edition of CPO News, part of our ongoing series covering the recent announcements, hirings, and notable mentions of Chief Procurement Officers and other procurement leaders. We’ve added some general procurement news to today’s article as well. Contact us with your news story here.

Lightning eMotors Hires New Chief Procurement Officer

Lightning eMotors, a Colorado-based provider of specialty commercial electric vehicles for fleets has recently announced Steve Ivsan as its new chief procurement officer. Ivsan joins the company’s senior leadership team and will lead all purchasing activities as well as oversee the quality and performance of the supply base. Lightning eMotors has been providing specialized and sustainable fleet solutions since 2010, and been deploying complete zero-emission-vehicle (ZEV) solutions for commercial fleets since 2017.

Prior to the new role at Lightning eMotors, Ivsan served as executive vice president of supply chain, manufacturing and assembly operations at Outrider Technologies, an autonomous vehicle startup in the logistics industry, where he led supply chain and manufacturing processes, strategies, tooling, and partnerships. Prior to joining Outrider, Ivsan was one of the co-founders of Byton, where he also served as chief procurement officer. Ivsan also served as chief procurement officer at Rivian and was the director of vehicle purchasing at Tesla. Prior to that, he was with Continental, a global automotive and technology company, for 12 years, and with Chrysler Corporation for six years.

IRS Procurement Chief Pushes New Robotic Process Automation “Bot”

The Internal Revenue Service has invested in automation tools to handle manual tasks common to reviewing thousands of contracts. In 2020, the IRS decided to use a well-established bot that handled one task (correcting data errors in the Federal Procurement Data System), to take on the new job. IRS Chief Procurement Officer Shanna Webbers said her decision to approve the bot for this work saved the agency about a year of manual work, and has freed up contracting officials to better support the agency’s needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The decision to greenlight the bot for this purpose, in order to meet a tight deadline, was a matter of “intelligent risk-taking.”

The IRS was facing a time crunch that stemmed from provision in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act barring agencies from using telecommunications equipment from a handful of Chinese companies. The language included in the Act also required agencies to review their portfolio of contracts and guarantee compliance. To minimize the risk of running the bot, the IRS completed the modifications outside its contract routing system, and assigned a unique identifier to the contracts the bot was supposed to modify. The bot completed the contract work in 3 days.

US Department of Defense Takes New Approach to Procurement Strategies

The United States Department of Defense’s latest rewrite of its internal acquisition rulebook, is a project called the Adaptive Acquisition Framework. The development of the AAF has been nearly four years in the making and aims to make the DoD’s acquisition system easier for the acquisition workforce to digest and navigate. The AAF guidebook, DoD Instruction 5000.02, had grown to nearly 200 pages, and “can be seen as a one-size-fits-all approach to Defense acquisition”, said Mike Coolican, who’s leading the Defense Acquisition University’s effort to train the DoD workforce on how to use AAF. The guidebook has split the main acquisition instruction into six smaller chunks, known as “pathways.” These pathways include:

• Major capability acquisition (the pathway that will handle most of the military’s traditional hardware procurements)
• Urgent capabilities
• Software (including, in some cases, software that will be part of major weapons systems)
• Business systems
• Services
• Middle-tier acquisitions that use the recently-enacted “Section 804” authority for rapid fielding and rapid prototyping.

Under AAF the objective is to start with a baseline of rules that only really matter for the pathway that best fits their program, and “tailor-in” whichever additional requirements and acquisition best practices fit the actual product or service they’re buying or building.

The acquisition enablers office is headed by Stacy Cummings, a career acquisition professional who is currently serving as DoD’s acting undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment during the transition between administrations. Prior to that, Cummings also led the development of the AAF framework. It is up to acquisition professionals to use more of their own judgement about which pathways to use or combine together.

Uber Freights Announces Expansion of Procurement Solutions

Uber Freight recently announced that it is further expanding its real-time freight procurement offerings by introducing Market Access, a procurement channel that aims to enable shippers to reliably source capacity directly on the Uber Freight marketplace and visibility into costs. Uber Freight has introduced solutions through its Uber Freight API to help shipper partners navigate the market. With Market Access, shippers can place loads directly on Uber Freight’s marketplace of more than 70,000 carriers and use Uber Freight’s AI-powered pricing algorithms to competitively source capacity. Upon delivery, shippers will pay the carrier cost realized on the Uber Freight marketplace plus a pre-agreed-upon fee, gaining full cost transparency. Several enterprise shippers around the United States are already using Market Access to help reduce transportation cost and streamline logistics operations. New tools like Market Access and Uber Freight’s API integrations that are more efficient and reliable, help shippers spend less time planning loads or adjusting to unexpected variables and more time delivering value to customers.

Baltimore City Seeks to Overhaul Outdated Procurement System

Brandon M. Scott, the new mayor of Baltimore elected this past November, said last week that his administration is moving forward with a new effort to reform the City’s procurement process. The first move for the city was to issue a request for proposals from contractors to conduct an assessment of current procurement policies and practices. The city procurement process determines which businesses get contracts to perform city services. This includes services like performing security at City Hall or cleaning city pools for example. The current procurement process has long been identified as an area in need of structural and technological reforms. Mayor Scott said he intends for the new reforms to center around equity for local and small businesses in Baltimore. Under the current system, the City must hire the lowest bidder, and while Mayor Scott believes that cost effectiveness is important, it is not the only factor. “We also need to, and will, consider best value to ensure that our local businesses can benefit and navigate the city’s procurement system, and so that we can create opportunity for our small businesses, particularly our minority- and women-owned businesses,” Scott said. The new systems must also ensure that vendors are paid on time, which the city has struggled with for years. Once a contractor is selected, the assessment will include a review of all procurement activity within city agencies.

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