Rat Poison to RFP Relief:The Story Behind Cooperative Procurement
Something breaks. A permitting system goes down, a grant has to be spent before year end, council approves emergency funding for a project that can't wait. You need experienced help now. So you open a procurement process, and now the fix that should take weeks is stuck behind a full RFP cycle: drafting requirements, forming an evaluation committee, running a formal bid period, then finally getting started, long after the urgency that started the whole thing.
Cooperative procurement exists to close that gap, and the idea is older than most people realize. In 1936, a group of Alberta municipalities pooled their buying power to solve a shared problem: securing goods, rat poison among them, that were hard for any single town to procure on its own. That small act of collaboration grew into what's now Canoe Procurement Group of Canada, a national cooperative serving over 6,000 municipalities, public sector entities, and not-for-profits across every province and territory.
The network kept growing from there. In 2014, Canoe partnered with Sourcewell to broaden what it could offer, and through the rest of that decade, provinces from Newfoundland and Labrador to the Northwest Territories joined one by one. By 2021, Canoe unified under a single national brand covering all 12 provinces and territories, with contracts already tendered and fully compliant with CFTA and CETA. Members go straight to the work instead of starting a new bid process.
CDW Canada holds one of those Canoe contracts, covering both technology products and IT services, with equivalent contracts through Kinetic GPO and OECM. Perry Group has a partnership with CDW Canada that lets our services be contracted through them across all three: Canoe, Kinetic GPO, and OECM.
In practice, that means if your municipality already has approval to use any of those vehicles, you can bring Perry Group on through our pre-vetted contract instead of building a new procurement from the ground up. Same rigour, same compliance, a fraction of the timeline.
Here's the range that opens up:
IT strategy and governance, from current state reviews and IT master plans to organization design and policy development
Digital and customer experience, including maturity assessments, CX strategy, and contact centre setup
Cybersecurity and resilience, covering incident response, business continuity, and disaster recovery planning
GIS and data strategy, from maturity assessments through tactical roadmaps
Solutions and project advisory across ERP, CRM, PPL, WAM, ECM, WCM, and public safety systems, from business case to implementation
Change management, transition planning, and IT leadership coaching
That's the full breadth of what a Canoe, Kinetic GPO, or OECM approval can unlock. It's strategy work as much as it's technology work, and it's exactly why municipalities bring us in for the problems that don't have an easy off the shelf answer.
If your organization already holds one of these approvals, getting started with Perry Group can move a lot faster than a traditional RFP.
Book a call and we'll walk you through how it works.
This article was prepared with the assistance of AI.
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