Staff Size Shrinking? How to Really ‘Do More with Less’

Every public procurement official in California has probably heard some version of “do more with less” this year, whether it’s in a budget presentation, a conversation with department heads, or in staffing freezes.

Sure, in theory, you get it, right? But what does it REALLY mean? “More” of what, exactly? What is “less?” And how do we actually do that?

Let’s attempt to answer those questions honestly, from the perspective of what realistic efficiency gains look like in practice – where they come from, what they require, and where the limits are.

What Is Procurement Efficiency?

Procurement efficiency isn’t the same thing as speed. A procurement process that moves fast but produces low-quality solicitations, inadequate vendor competition, or documentation gaps is fragile, not efficient. Cutting corners results in far more errors and protests than the time saved.

Real efficiency in procurement means reducing friction in the right places, in the steps that consume time without adding value, while maintaining or improving quality in the places that matter. Thinking this way changes where you look for time gains.

The manual steps that typically consume a ton of time without providing a lot of value usually fall into four categories: document creation, coordination overhead, status tracking, and compliance verification. It’s work examining each one separately to understand the opportunity for time savings.

Where Friction Lives and What Reduces It

Document Creation

Procurement teams that create new solicitations largely from scratch or by copying and editing old files spend substantial time on each new project. That hidden cost of that time adds up incrementally across many small decisions.

Locating a prior RFP, editing out the prior vendor’s name, updating scope language, reformatting evaluation criteria, and checking compliance requirements before releasing could take an hour and a half manually – or 15 minutes with the right procurement infrastructure. Multiplied across dozens of solicitations per year, the time cost is significant.

Standardization, like a library of vetted and organized solicitation templates or pre-approved template language, fixes this time issue. Documentation, process workflows, and a streamlined system that is accessible, searchable, and auditable removes the waste of starting from scratch entirely.

Coordination Overhead

Coordination is essential for procurement. But notifying vendors, collecting addendum acknowledgments, managing evaluator schedules, and routing approvals all generate significant administrative overhead when done manually. Someone must initiate, track, follow up, and document each task to maintain compliance and receive competitive bids.

But when vendor notifications go out through email lists maintained in spreadsheets, a buyer has to build the list, send the email, track delivery, and manually record notifications. The same goes for setting up evaluations and ensuring each evaluator has followed the correct scoring rubric and acknowledged any conflicts of interest. And approvals that are verbal or scattered in email make record keeping almost impossible.

Automating these steps in a digital procurement platform doesn’t eliminate the coordination, but it does eliminate the manual overhead required. Vendor notifications get triggered automatically when the solicitation is posted. Digital bids are submitted with automated checks for completion, and online evaluation tools ensure standardized scoring across evaluators and submissions. The coordination still happens, but it doesn’t require an individual to manage each step separately.

Status Tracking

In manual procurement, a large amount of time is spent answering process questions. What stage is this solicitation in? When does it close? Have we awarded yet? Is the contract completed?

If the solicitation status lives in the buyer’s head or in a spreadsheet that’s only updated by one person, every status check requires work. Supervisors have to ask buyers for status updates individually, and if the key project lead is out, the question might not get answered at all.

A shared, visible status view that shows every active solicitation stage, timeline, and ownership to authorized team members eliminates most of this overhead. There’s no need to ask questions when you can check the status yourself. This is pivotal time and effort savings for a team that has lost staff or has frozen hiring and is covering more work with fewer members.

Compliance Verification

Insurance certificates expire, contractor registrations lapse, and business licenses must be renewed annually. In a manual procurement environment, this vendor compliance tracking means building a complex system of reminders, spreadsheet entries, and periodic checks that generate ongoing work and potential lapses.

In a digital procurement system, the compliance is automated. The system monitors vendor compliance status continuously and generates alerts when something is expiring soon or missing. Compliance is still documented, but without the overhead of individual checks and updates.

For lean teams, this not only saves time but also reduces risk. Manual compliance tracking fails under pressure and sets you up for missing documentation, lapsed certifications, or failure to meet regulations. But automated tracking doesn’t fail under pressure.

Adding It All Up

Moving to a modern, connected digital procurement system won’t necessarily produce sudden or dramatic cost savings in these categories, although you will notice time saved almost immediately.

But the cumulative reduction in administrative overhead will eliminate the tedious tasks to help your team focus on the substantive work, like building solicitations, evaluating proposals, building vendor relationships, and managing award decisions. These adjustments will lead to greater efficiency, more competitive bids, less compliance risk, and better outcomes, as well as a happier team and more responsible use of public funds.

When people say, “Doing more with less,” this tradeoff is what they mean.

The Honest Trade-Off

To get to this kind of operating efficiency, agencies do need to commit to an upfront investment in platform adoption, process documentation, and staff training. For teams already stretched thin, that investment isn’t trivial. It takes valuable time to set up templates, configure and document workflows, and migrate data from wherever it currently lives.

The argument for making that investment now, rather than later, is straightforward: the return compounds over time, A template library built now will save time on every solicitation issued next quarter and the quarter after that. An automated notification workflow set up before the next major bid cycle removes the manual overhead from every solicitation in that budget year.

If you wait until fiscal pressure eases to modernize your procurement infrastructure, you may be waiting forever. The truth is, there is no perfect time to make the move. But there is a right time: now. While California agencies have received some near-term budget relief, the structural deficits forecast for 2028-29 are already on the horizon. So now is the time to get ready, before the next round of cuts starts falling.