Today PEPPM Cooperative Purchasing announced that Amazon Business won an education and public sector purchasing contract.
Bid-protected access to Amazon Business under the PEPPM contract was launched today, following a competitively bid award by the Central Susquehanna Intermediate Unit (CSIU) of Milton, Pennsylvania, the education agency that operates the nationwide cooperative known as PEPPM.
Schools, colleges, cities, counties, and other governments will be eligible to buy from Amazon Business.
The contract and bidding process solved a unique problem facing public agencies: the need for a competitively bid contract based on dynamic pricing. PEPPM required bidders to provide bid pricing based on commercially available marketplace prices on a “Snapshot Day,” so that fair comparisons could be established among potential bidders.
The result is that more than one million products useful to public sector agencies on Amazon Business are eligible for purchase without most agencies having to go to bid themselves.
Amazon Business is committed to providing access to commonly purchased products in the categories of Breakroom Supplies, Foodstuffs, Cafeteria Supplies, and Kitchen Equipment, First Aid and Safety, Instructional, Art, and Craft Supplies, Maintenance, Repair, and Operations, and Office Supplies. Outside of these categories are more than one million additional products under contract.
In developing its request for bids, PEPPM, under the auspices of the CSIU, set for itself 19 bidding process criteria that were meant to satisfy the procurement rules of even the most conservative jurisdictions. It meant making the bid specifications applicable to a wide number of marketplaces, wide distribution of the bidding invitation, and the capability of evaluating more than one million product prices.
“We now have access to a dynamic marketplace backed by strict bidding standards, transparency, and a trusted purchasing cooperative,” said John Brenchley, chief innovation officer for the CSIU.
Jared Lehman, associate director of cooperative purchasing for the CSIU said, “It wasn’t easy to develop this request for bids. It took months of study, lengthy legal reviews, and multiple iterations of terms, conditions, and specifications.”
The CSIU is a political subdivision of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, created by the Pennsylvania Legislature. Its PEPPM co-op purchasing program started in 1982 and currently has competitively bid purchasing contracts in force with national manufacturers that have been used by education and local governments throughout the United States.
