Project
Instructions

Project: Promoting Sustainability by Government Procurement:

In Discussion 2, many of you posted excellent comments on Sustainable Logistics. Naturally, the government has more important responsibilities than private companies: 1). The government in general is the biggest purchaser in a nation, spending typically 15%-30% of GDP; and 2). The government uses public money (i.e., taxpayers' money) that should serve general public beyond just making profit or taking care of economy. This contrasts to a private company that uses private money for its own good first.
Sustainability is an important issue for all of us and procurement is sometimes called inbound logistics. So, this project is the joint of these two: Promoting Sustainability by Government Procurement.

In general, your report should have five sections: summary, introduction, analysis (model/method), result, and conclusion. You may adjust to more or less sections with slightly different section names to suit your individual report. Below is a general guideline for each section.

Summary

The summary section summarizes your whole report.

Introduction

The introduction section introduces the basics of sustainability and public procurement: what, why, who, how, etc. For example, what issustainability? What are fundamental reasons: economic, social, and environmental? What are those differential operations? Who are important players? How to improve sustainability through government procurement (i.e., public procurement)?

What is public procurement? Do all USA federal public procurement (or government procurement) have to use a procurement center like General Services Administration (GSA, gsa.gov) as agent? Or, USA federal governments/agencies/organizations can buy whatever they want as long as under budgetary restrictions? Does GSA control the purchasing, or a federal agency (the buyer) controls the purchasing? What are key differences of using and not using GSA?

How about state governments/agencies/organizations, and general public organizations?
GSA also has some sustainability initiatives, http://www.gsa.gov/portal/category/26433. What is GSAs role in promoting sustainability?

What are current major problems and issues?

For your reference, I post some materials under Content/Project Materials. You can find my two recent publications on China's public/government procurement, so you can get a feeling about what your report look like. You can also web search these major laws in government procurement: Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949, Armed Services Procurement Act, and Federal Acquisition Regulations System/Codes of Federal Regulations. The government has a website, performance.gov (Initiatives/Sustainability), which reports sustainability scorecards for different federal agencies.

Analysis (Model/Method)

There are at least three key elements in your analysis. First, list your main resources: personal experiences, published articles, online materials, companies' practices, etc. Second, apply theoretical knowledge you learned at TSU, particularly in management and marketing. Third, conduct rigorous examination.

Besides traditional economic analysis, please emphasize sustainability (environment and society). Below are some examples:
• How governments can design laws and regulations, subsidies, and tax incentives for sustainability?
• How to improve government procurement with or without a procurement agent like GSA? Centralized or decentralized purchasing?
• How to encourage public and private partnerships?
• Environment impact throughout a product's lifecycle, including hazardous materials use, energy consumption, air pollution, water consumption and pollution, and end-of-life management for remanufacture, recycle, and disposal.
• Societal equity, community involvement, corporate citizenship, etc.
Result

In the result section, you present detailed and concrete findings, based on your analysis. For instance, you may find that there is essentially not enough government involvement in Sustainability. Most people have no idea that we even have public procurement, or the opposite.

Conclusion

The conclusion section concludes your report by recapping key results, presenting weaknesses in current practices, and showing future directions.

This is an individual project; please upload your report as a word document with your own name on the first page. Please type your report with a double-space format and use the APA style. Make sure that you use appropriate references. You may check following websites for further details about APA style: