Welcome to the Capital Area Purchasing Association (CAPA)!

CAPA is the premier organization for public procurement professionals in and around the heart of Virginia.  Here, procurement experts collaborate, learn, and share ideas in all areas of government purchasing to help maximize taxpayer spend and sustain the Commonwealth's financial stability.

Our members represent procurement-related careers in state and local government, higher education, and other public bodies across Central Virginia.  CAPA is a nonprofit, nonpartisan chapter of the National Institute of Governmental Purchasing (NIGP).

Thanks for visiting our site, and for helping us "Capitalize Purchasing Professionals"!

************************************************************************************
CAPA UPDATE!

Ron King, CPPB, CPPO, VCO 2013 CAPA President

March is Purchasing Month.  This is a good time for us to take a well-deserved, and often overlooked, opportunity to reflect upon what we as purchasing professionals do and the value we add to our organizations.  While many of us know how vital the services we provide are, we often do not really take time to reflect on it or to let our upper management know of our quite accomplishments and contributions.

While modesty is considered a virtue, too much of it may hurt our careers and profession.  Purchasing professionals are notorious for just doing our job and being satisfied with the sense of personal satisfaction and pride we take in doing a job well.  That approach may have been fine in the past.  In order for us, however, to continue to make strides in being recognized as the professionals we are, we need to "toot our own horn" a bit.  We do not need to be obnoxious about it, but we need to make sure others, upper management in particular, know what we do and the value of it.

We can do this in many ways.  One straight-forward, practical way is to submit regular (monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual) reports on cost savings/cost avoidances initiated by the entity's purchasing office.  Nothing gets management's attention much quicker than money!  These reports can be useful on a number of levels--to show the budget types that we are worth our salaries, to show how much we contribute in actual dollars and cents to the bottom line, to justify needed buyer positions, etc.

Also, since we are in a unique position to see who are the spenders in our entities and what they are buying, we can be a valuable source of information when it comes to strategic planning.  This knowledge that we acquire by simply doing our job on a daily basis can prove invaluable--and we all have it in our heads!

I am proud to say that I am one of you.  Purchasing people are great.  As a whole we are honest, loyal, competent.  (Hmmmm... we sound like Boy Scouts!)  To our disadvantage, though, we are too modest.  We need to make sure others know the value of what we do and how much we really contribute to the bottom line.  What time is better than now, Purchasing Month, to do that?