No Reds, No Regrets: Turning Procurement into a Friendly Race

What if you could cut overdue bids by more than half without buying a new e-procurement system? We sit down with Stacia Dawson and Michael Stroud from Missouri’s Division of Purchasing to unpack a practical playbook for turnaround time management that anyone can adopt. Their approach blends simple tooling—Smartsheet for structured data and Tableau for clear visuals—with tight weekly reviews that turn insights into action.

We walk through the foundations: setting phase-based goals, logging actual dates with consistency, and using a stoplight status to keep focus on what’s at risk. Stacia shares how the team moved beyond giant spreadsheets and guesswork to a living dashboard that sorts work from oldest to newest, reveals bottlenecks fast, and makes it easy to intervene. Michael explains why low-code tools were the right fit: low cost, fast to implement, and flexible enough to evolve as the team learned. The result? A 62% reduction in overdue bids, faster cycle times, and a shared understanding of what drives delays.

If you’re looking to modernize public procurement with limited resources, this story shows exactly where to start: one sheet, a few well-chosen fields, simple color rules, and a weekly cadence that makes data matter. Subscribe for more practical procurement strategies, share this episode with your team, and tell us: which metric would you track first to unlock faster, fairer awards?

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