City of Long Beach: Leading with People, Powered by Data

Overview

The City of Long Beach, the 7th most populous city in the most populous state and one of the 50 largest cities in the United States, has undergone a remarkable procurement transformation in recent years.

When Michelle Wilson stepped into her role as Purchasing Agent for the City of Long Beach, she didn’t just inherit a procurement function; she inherited a perception problem. Departments saw procurement as a barrier. Vendors found the process confusing. Internally, trust was low, and externally, visibility was limited.

Fast forward five years, and Long Beach has emerged as a model of what public sector procurement transformation looks like when it’s driven by culture change, community engagement, and transparency. Their journey, dubbed the “Extreme Procurement Makeover,” is a blueprint for how people-led modernization, supported by technology, can create a lasting impact.

The Challenge: Rebuilding Trust and Visibility from the Inside Out

Before the transformation began, procurement in Long Beach was seen as slow, opaque, and overly bureaucratic. The systems in place offered little visibility into vendor types or cycle times. Internal departments often avoided engaging with Purchasing altogether, citing confusion and delays as reasons.

“We couldn’t tell our story,” says Michelle Wilson, Purchasing Agent for the City of Long Beach. “Councilmembers were asking, ‘How much business are we doing with local, women-owned, or minority vendors?’ But we had no way to tell them. We couldn’t prove the impact we knew we were making.”

Wilson, a 28-year City veteran with roots in Parks and Recreation, brought an outsider’s lens to procurement, and that’s what made the difference. “I didn’t speak finance when I got here,” she recalls. “I came with a very different and fresh perspective as far as what purchasing even is. I only thought it was complicated, and it was making my life on the other side very hard.”

The Strategy: A People-First, Data-Backed Transformation

The City’s approach unfolded in waves:

1. Cultural Transformation First

Michelle’s first focus wasn’t technology. It was trust. Her team redesigned templates to be more inviting, rewrote communications to make them more accessible outside of Finance, and led “Purchasing 101” training sessions to reset the relationship with internal departments.

“We didn’t lead with systems,” Wilson said. “We led with empathy and made purchasing make sense again.”

That human-first approach laid the groundwork for everything that followed.

2. Data-Driven Modernization

Recognizing that their existing tools provided limited visibility, Long Beach partnered with SOVRA to modernize its entire process. The goal wasn’t just automation; it was insight.

“It’s really easy to say purchasing is slow,” Wilson explains. “But we really had to dig into where the slow points were. And if you don’t have a system that kind of captures all of the process, it’s really hard.”

With the new platform in place, the City could finally track vendor types, contract status, and business participation across categories like local, minority-owned, and women-owned, a key demand from elected officials that had previously gone unmet.

3. Process Transparency and Training

With better visibility into the full process, the team quickly discovered that the most significant bottlenecks weren’t in Purchasing itself, but instead in the department-led steps at the beginning and end. Writing solicitations and evaluating proposals were often delayed due to confusion or a lack of training.

“We found that departments didn’t know how to create good solicitations, so they avoided it or found ways around the process,” Wilson said. “SOVRA helped us see where the real issues were. And we used that information to educate and empower departments, not just point fingers.”

The team launched monthly user meetings, opened channels for anonymous feedback, and prioritized training sessions to rebuild confidence and ownership citywide.