Onvia Exceeds Over 1,000 US Government Agencies Connecting Directly with Businesses Through Onvia Exchange and DemandStar

Onvia, the leading provider of sales intelligence and acceleration technologies for businesses selling to the public sector, announced that the Onvia for Government initiative has now exceeded over 1,000 state, local and education agency participants nationwide using both Onvia Exchange and DemandStar. Onvia Exchange is the most comprehensive library of published purchasing records featuring more 1.8 million procurement documents from tens of thousands of government entities collected yearly, with over 2,500 bids and RFP packages added daily. Now, more agencies will be able to gain access without requirements to contribute data.

 This announcement aligns with Onvia’s scope of involvement at the annual NIGP Forum in Salt Lake City, which includes:
  • Partnering with National Cooperative Procurement Partners to host a complimentary networking and happy hour event on Sunday August 27th designed to connect businesses, governments and cooperative purchasing groups
  • Moderating a panel procurement for smart cities, featuring top procurement professionals and experts, on Monday, August 28th
  • Exhibit tools and technologies for business and government in booth #729

Enabling Efficiency in Public Purchasing

In Onvia’s 2017 survey of more than 600 public purchasing professionals from federal, state, local and educational governments, 40% reported being over-worked and that their top challenge was finding the time for pre-bid research and planning.

Ben Vaught - Image
Ben Vaught

“We started Onvia Exchange with a vision of growing a community of government users who use data to improve their own procurement performance. As the world becomes more transparent, we are bringing Onvia Exchange and investments in DemandStar to all state, local and educational governments in the U.S,” said Ben Vaught, Director of Onvia for Government.

Here’s how Onvia Exchange users are extracting measurable value from the tool to save time in the bid and RFP research and authoring process, while benchmarking their procurement performance against their peers:

  • “Onvia Exchange has been a very helpful tool both for our purchasing agents and client departments. It has helped us in researching bids, developing specifications and finding additional supply sources. This has allowed us to reduce our lead time in developing solicitations while increasing our competition base.” – Jim Tillman, Purchasing Manager, Broward County, FL
  • “Onvia Exchange gives the ability to quickly search and filter for comparable bids and RFPs by type of purchase or location. It has made my process more efficient and the platform is so easy to use.” – Dawn Berry, Purchasing Agent, Town of Little Elm, TX
  • “The City of Perryville is seeing an immediate impact from using the Onvia Exchange.” – Tracy Prost, City Clerk, City of Perryville, MO

Data in the Onvia Exchange is sourced, organized and displayed using the most modern search technologies and Onvia’s proprietary ontology. Users are empowered to save valuable time by identifying relevant contract examples to streamline their bid research and authoring processes, as well as to collaborate with peers in the procurement community. In addition, agency users can reduce the time spent responding to time-consuming FOIA requests with capabilities that allow for easy upload of awards records and bid results data directly through the system. This not only cuts the time spent responding to public records requests, it also enriches the datasets that both Onvia’s business clients and government agency partners enjoy.

“With Onvia Exchange and DemandStar, over 1,000 purchasing departments are already taking a data-driven approach to their procurement processes to deliver more value for the citizens they serve. Purchasing officials across the country report cutting their research time by over 50% as well as identifying more piggybacking and cooperative purchasing opportunities,” said Vaught.

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