All right. So procurement obviously is more than just purchasing, right? It's about making kind of those strategic decisions that can impact whoever that agency is serving or whoever they're working with or the communities that they're in. And so how do you see procurement support helping agencies make better decisions for the people that they serve?

I'll answer that. I'll actually speak briefly to your preamble there about procurement and purchasing. So to me, purchasing is the activity of ensuring that that moment of compliance, that moment of connecting the dots between the process and the procedure. There is absolute honor in purchasing. As I complete this sentence, I'm not making a negative comment on purchasing, but purchasing tends to get isolated into being a clerking type function from the perspective of leadership. So we always say that procurement is is the entire holistic activity that surrounds the purchasing function and elevates it into being a strategic asset for these entities. And we want to bring procurement forward as a strategic asset. We want to help to elevate that because procurement is able to serve the departments by being able to say, well, what problem are you seeking to solve? Not just what did you put down on the paper in the RFP that you perceive? What problem are we trying to solve? And what is the way to go to market in order to create that opportunity? Am I procuring something that has been procured many times. And so I'm trying to drive a few terms that have evaded me and drive a best price and a best outcome from a risk perspective. Am I trying to create a market, which means I have to be able to be a little bit more entrepreneurial in how I put it to market, being willing to have the potential for failure in a sourcing event because I'm trying to create something new. A lot of people who've been in procurement saying the words being willing to accept a small amount of risk of failure does not resonate the first time that you say it because they've always been told lock it in 100% of the time. But if we're really dealing with our business partners to say, what is the right concept? So your question was about how does procurement support departments in delivering on this? It's a combination of making sure that those parts of our organization that are more commoditized and more part of our core supply chain, that we're locking those down in a certain way. But we're also able to say, how is the way that we are driving this event going to maximize the outcomes of the departments? You know, one of the things I've always said about that job that I had in government where I was doing procurement, that if you like changing government, then you should love procurement because you never have more opportunity to change things when you have money in one hand and requirements in the other. But we've never taught the procurement people to think that way if they were not empowered by a strategic leader in the past. So really understanding that procurement is the expression of the program and the ability to come to market to seek business partners that want to be aligned with our goals is one of the highest expressions of the opportunity in procurement.

As opposed to what I think I've seen often, which is compliance and risk mitigation. And those are such different roles, right? And I think, and again, there is a place for that in commodities and low risk, right? Like things that you purchase all the time. But if you are looking at something that you're trying to change or do something different, that type of innovation and creativity and thoughtfulness at the beginning and that kind of visioning work and thinking about the market is so important. So important.

Well, it's a combination of having people in the procurement roles who can see and act that way. And then if they haven't been given the opportunity in the past to help them learn how to have that skill, because if all you were allowed to do was be in a box this big for an amount of time, then how do you know to even be able to suggest a business that maybe we go this way or maybe we go that way? I talk a lot about compliant and. Compliance is not a solution in and of itself. Being compliant, you can be compliant and have a terrible sourcing event. You can be compliant and have no vendor support respond to your solicitation. You can be compliant and set up a transaction model that's going to eat all of the money before the project's even done. So compliant cannot be the end goal. It has to be compliant and. I talk about compliance and innovation. I also think compliant and being a modern business partner is a really important concept because there is no procurement without vendors. So understanding what it takes for the vendors to be able to be successful and being able to create a situation where you have at least two vendors at the end of the game who are capable of delivering the service so that you can fulfill your responsibility. If you get to the end of a sourcing event that is fully compliant and you only have one vendor that you're negotiating with, you have not served the goals. So it's very important to drive an activity that has those characteristics.

Yeah, and I think that those competing priorities between that innovation or a different way of doing things and compliance, I think that is where we've seen agencies trying, and usually because we're pushing the agencies, hey, try this, try this, right? Like, if you don't think there's going to be any competition, then let's have a vendor fair. If you don't know exactly what the solution is, and we've done things like what you've talked about, Dustin, like either give them just the problem or just the outcomes, right, rather than detailed requirements. Another one that we've have challenges around is if you know and the pricing is pretty clear, then just publish the budget, right? And then you take price off the table. When we're kind of trying to push agencies to be a little bit more innovative to deal with some of their challenges, they will go back to central procurement to try to get it approved and they get the red flag. You know, hey, we don't do that. That's not in the regs or that's not in our rules. And I think that's the challenge, right, is how do you And again, we're not telling them do this for every sourcing event or every procurement, but when it's necessary and when it needs to be used and when you need to try a different tool or be more innovative, how do you balance that with the compliance, right? And with a central procurement agency that is kind of dealing with a lot and trying to keep the road moving in a very similar fashion for all the agencies. Yeah.