Greg Young, Unison, GM Civilian
Federal procurement teams are under increasing pressure to act with speed, precision, and accountability. But many of the resources they once relied on—seasoned 1102s, full-time acquisition support staff, and time to do market research—have thinned out. As program demands continue to grow, acquisition teams are expected to do more with less and to do it faster than ever.
This gap between capacity and expectation has changed the modernization conversation. The priority has shifted from upgrading tools to protecting the capacity to deliver. Agencies need procurement workflows that absorb administrative load, guide less experienced users, and move at the pace of funding and mission timelines.
Strategic Time is Lost to Routine Tasks
At the center of the problem is time. Highly trained acquisition professionals are still required to build statements of work, performance objectives, and evaluation templates from scratch or using templates that are impossible to keep up to date. Program offices wait days or weeks for vendor options or pricing data. And as end-of-year pressures mount, entire teams are pulled into triage, trying to source, evaluate, and award under shrinking timelines.
Many are unaware that digital tools now exist to reduce the time it takes to complete these tasks drastically. Reverse auctions, AI document generation, clause selection tools, and automated sourcing can deliver procurement-ready outputs within hours. Instead of consuming staff capacity, these tools return it, giving contracting officers more room to apply judgment, manage risk, engage with stakeholders, and manage a higher volume of contracts.
Better Competition Starts with Better Discovery
The expectation to find the best value remains. But for many teams, market research still relies on static government websites, outdated vendor pools, or time-consuming RFI processes. This approach makes it harder to surface qualified small businesses, local providers, or niche suppliers. It also reinforces pressure from manufacturers and large vendors to steer agencies away from competitive price discovery.
Smarter vendor identification tools allow teams to source against real-time data and broader supplier pools, improving cost outcomes and small business participation. Reverse auctions, now included in the FAR, further strengthen price competition by automating real-time negotiation, making price negotiations transparent, and providing auditable documentation. User-friendly, digital tools are available to support savings goals and acquisition compliance, without adding complexity.
Visibility Without More Headcount
With significantly increased oversight and fewer acquisition managers, visibility is critical. Teams need to know where a requirement sits in the competition process without requesting updates or digging through emails. The systems supporting procurement must provide transparency by default, not as an extra step.
Supervisor dashboards and audit-ready reporting and dashboards can fill this gap. These tools reduce delays, help agencies plan more effectively, and support mission focus even when open positions remain unfilled. Clearer insight into the process leads to stronger decisions and fewer delays across the acquisition lifecycle.
Preparing for the End-of-Year Wave
Each summer brings a familiar concern: How will agencies execute against delayed budgets when the bulk of obligations still sit ahead? Many anticipate another surge of end-of-year activity, but with leaner teams and tighter timelines. The usual approach of working longer hours isn’t sustainable.
Instead, agencies are preparing by investing in procurement processes that scale and are configurable, not custom-built. Pre-built templates, upstream collaborative procurement workflows, and integrated tracking reduce the bottlenecks that typically appear in August and September. When requirements are competition-ready in less time, teams can focus on awards, not paperwork.
Speed and Structure Can Coexist
With procurement teams consolidating and centralizing, Acquisition responsibilities are shifting upstream to include more program staff. Structure will become essential. Agencies can do more with less by setting up digital tools that have guardrails, templates, and automated checks to support this shift. These tools do not replace contracting officers. They support them. There are inherent risks that can be mitigated when fewer seasoned contracting professionals are asked to do more with less.
In some agencies, procurement lead times have dropped from 28 days to just one day by aligning users, data, and workflows within digital COTS platforms. These results don’t come from cutting corners. They come from reducing the friction between steps, especially where sourcing, documentation, and approvals used to bog teams down.
Digital procurement platforms that support this kind of velocity typically can also generate ready-to-audit documentation, track acquisition activity through supervisor dashboards, and create reporting aligned with category management and prices paid initiatives. Capabilities like these should no longer be considered optional as oversight expands and staffing levels shrink.
Savings are realized beyond just faster timelines. Agencies using tools like reverse auctions have documented 12% reductions in the cost of commercial items, products, and services, along with increased participation from small businesses. That kind of value is difficult to achieve through traditional processes with a smaller staff.
When Working Harder Isn’t an Option
The procurement workforce is not expanding. Oversight is not easing. The need to prove savings, move faster, and stay compliant is not going away. For agencies working under pressure, the answer is not to work harder. It is to work differently.
It is possible to return capacity to overextended contracting offices, but it will come from innovative tools, structured collaboration, and systems that reduce manual effort. Procurement teams that proceed with those principles in mind will have an easier time supporting their agency’s missions.
