Oklahoma’s statewide contract search site is a gateway to 1,500 pre-negotiated contracts that support procurement across the state. Users historically had to know exact contract numbers or use precise search terms to find what they needed.
“A contract search platform should enable efficient discovery without requiring users to know the outcome in advance,” says Lesli Bajema, director of statewide procurement strategy at Oklahoma’s Office of Management and Enterprise Services (OMES). “My goal was to create an experience that makes statewide contracts easy to find, understand, and use.”
“A contract search platform should enable efficient discovery without requiring users to know the outcome in advance. My goal was to create an experience that makes statewide contracts easy to find, understand, and use.”
The problem
OMES manages statewide contracts that state agencies, school districts, cities, counties, and universities can buy from. Oklahoma’s state procurement efforts generated nearly $180 million in savings and cost avoidance in Fiscal Year 2025. Its previous platform for contracts and solicitations was difficult to navigate and out of date. If a school district wanted to purchase a slide for its playground, for example, nothing came up on the old platform under “playground slide,” and “slide” surfaced contracts for laboratory equipment and supplies.
Even if you could find the contract you were looking for on the old site, it wasn’t always clear if the information was up to date. When Bajema stepped into her new role in 2025, OMES’s contract information lived in scattered records. “Contract information existed across multiple processes and tracking methods, which made it difficult to maintain a consistent enterprise view,” she says. “One of my priorities was establishing a single, standardized source of truth that improves data quality, strengthens contract management and gives us better insights to support strategic procurement decisions.”
The solution
OMES partnered with Concourse to build a new platform that would serve as the single, easily searchable source of truth for statewide contracts.
The old site’s keyword search was replaced with one that finds contracts by number, supplier, category code, or the product itself, including terms buried deep inside contract documents. Now, when a purchasing officer searches for “playground slide” or “slide” on the new platform, contracts for parks and recreation equipment is the first thing to appear.
Category managers at OMES can easily add or update contracts on the same site that purchasing officers use to search for them. Behind the scenes, the same platform handles the financial administration of the statewide contracts, from supplier usage reports to invoicing.
The site launched less than 60 days after the partnership kicked off. “The implementation moved remarkably quickly without sacrificing quality,” says Bajema. “Concourse focused on understanding our business processes first, which allowed us to build a solution that reflects how Oklahoma actually manages statewide contracts.”
The results
Since the site launched in November 2025, OMES’s category managers have made nearly 15,000 updates to the state’s contracts, all in one place, on the same platform purchasers see. Bajema audits the data roughly every other week to ensure everything on the site is up to date. “The platform has fundamentally changed how we manage statewide contracts,” says Bajema. “We now have centralized, reliable information that supports better decision-making, improves operational efficiency, and increases confidence in the accuracy of our contract data.”
Purchasing officers are finding it easier to use, too. For Bajema, the site is part of a larger goal of making OMES a better partner to state agencies and affiliates. She quickly saw signs of it working. About once a month, OMES hosts an open forum where certified purchasing officers can ask questions and share feedback—roughly 500 people typically attend. When Bajema presented the site, the response was immediate. “The response from our agency partners confirmed we were solving the right problem. We consistently heard that the new platform is easier to navigate, faster to use, and helps purchasers find the contracts they need with far less effort.”
“We’re proud to partner with OMES on this new contract search platform, which will free up Oklahoma public servants to focus on the important work they signed up to do and, ultimately, save taxpayers money. Beyond this project, I’m inspired by the work that Amanda Otis, state purchasing director, and Lesli Bajema, director of statewide procurement strategy, and so many others are doing across the state to set the standard for effective government.”