​RightSource advisers attended a recent session reviewing the purchasing process for the City of Moreno Valley, CA.  These presentations are so helpful for the small business community while helping the City achieve its objective of having a diversified pool of vendors that can compete effectively to keep the City's costs low while delivering quality products and services.   Below, I'll summarize some of the key takeaways and how they differ from other communities in California:

North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) - established by the federal government as a successor to the SIC (Standard Industry Classification) system that preceded it.  Both SIC and NAICS codes are managed by the Federal Census Bureau (more than just counting people every ten years division) and available at census.gov.  The idea of all these coding systems is to clearly classify businesses so that economic and industrial data can be compared effectively.  It doesn't make sense to compare a bakery to Google, for example, when you are assessing

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis is a tool more closely related to manufacturing operations, but can be used as an incredibly helpful exercise to ensure process robustness.  It's a tool that is used in a variety of quality structures, including Six Sigma, For manufacturing, the premise is simple:  Break down every single item in a manufactured product and identify what happens if any single item fails on a scale of 1 to 5.