Introduction

In May 2017, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) embarked on a Department-wide effort known as ReImagine HHS (RHHS) in response to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Executive Memo M-17-22. The Executive Memo and the RHHS effort tasked agencies “to consider government-wide contracts for common goods and services to save money, avoid wasteful and redundant contracting actions, and free-up acquisition staff to accelerate procurements for high-priority mission work.” Through this effort, the BUYSMARTER initiative was born.

Figure 1: Paving the Way

A diagram showing the HHS BUYSMARTER journey from FY 2019 to FY 2022 starting from the Executive Office of the President seal and Office of Management & Budget (OMB). Agencies should consider government-wide contracts for common goods and services to save money, avoid wasteful and redundant contracting actions, and free-up acquisition staff to accelerate procurements for high-priority mission work. An image of the ReImagine HHS logo. In response to the call to action from OMB in spring 2017, HHS embarked on a Department-wide effort, known as ReImagine HHS, a robust transformation effort to improve HHS's ability to enhance the health and well-being of all Americans. ReImagine HHS is centered on six Strategic Shifts and BUYSMARTER as an Initiative team is executing on Strategic Shift: Generating Efficiencies Through Streamlined Processes, target — Acquisitions and Grants. An image of the BUYSMARTER wordmark. A transformative, data-driven strategy to establish a cohesive acquisition structure across HHS, leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other technologies combined with e-commerce solutions to modernize the entire procurement experience. HHS Strategic Plan FY 2018 – 2022. HHS GOAL #5: Promote Effective and Efficient Management and Stewardship Strong, modern financial systems and practices and targeted investments improve accountability, reporting, and decision making, which can lead to cost savings and efficiencies that improve how the Department manages its public funds. An image of President’s Management Agenda. CAP GOAL #7: Category Management - Leveraging Common Contracts and Best Practices to Drive Savings and Efficiencies. Federal agencies will leverage common contracts, meaning that they share in contracts that get the best value for taxpayers in order to buy common goods and services as an enterprise. This approach will eliminate redundancies, increase efficiency, and deliver more value and savings from Federal acquisition programs.

BUYSMARTER maximizes HHS’ enterprise purchasing power to establish a cohesive acquisition structure across HHS in order to drive better pricing and achieve better terms and conditions, while consolidating the total number of contracts and shifting acquisition staff-time to higher-priority, mission-critical work. BUYSMARTER’s collaborative approach leverages AI technology to assist in analyzing spend data and identifying opportunities that support enterprise acquisitions.

Stakeholder engagement and mission focus are the foundations of the entire BUYSMARTER effort. As such, the HHS agency heads of contracting activity (HCA) have been engaged to form the members of the Planning and Development Committee (PDC) from the onset. Every aspect of the people, process, and technology for BUYSMARTER has been designed with their guidance. Category Collaboratives have also been created to lead each category and sub-category pursuit with volunteers from across HHS agencies. These teams will then launch Sub-Category Pursuit Teams on individual good or service acquisitions, which will bring together subject matter experts from all the buying agencies. This entire community participated in human-centered design sessions to develop the Full Contract Scan (FCS) AI Tool.

This is the journey of how BUYSMARTER is moving from an initiative to a program on October 1, 2020.

Content created by Division of Acquisition
Content last reviewed