Your Favorite Brands
To bring you your favorite brands under a competitive bid, the Monterey County Office of Education (MCOE) uses innovative sourcing methods. It leverages the potential for a large demand and need for products by cooperating with purchasing cooperatives in other states. Suppliers, eager to sell into this pool of demand, respond with their best bid pricing for all participating cooperatives. However, all awards for California are made locally in California by MCOE, to ensure conformance with California law following the procedures spelled out in the state’s Public Contract Code, including...
read moreA little history
With more than 20 years of cooperative purchasing experience, CalSave has proven itself as a major channel to savings and efficiency for schools and public agencies in California and neighboring states. CalSave is sponsored by the Monterey County Office of Education. Launched in November 1999, as C-SMART, CalSave was originally funded by the California Department of Education (CDE) as one of the initiatives under the Department’s Statewide Educational Technology Services (SETS) program. Eventually, with MCOE as the lead bidding agency, CalSave became a self-sufficient and self-funded...
read moreThe Power of Cooperation
By working together, schools save money. By participating in a purchasing cooperative, you avoid the repetitive and unnecessary costs of going out to bid. Going out to bid is expensive both in hard costs and soft costs. School districts and other public agencies spend money and divert their time away from more strategic tasks when they create specifications, fine tune terms and conditions, develop a vendor pool, publish a bid, buy advertising, answer questions, hold pre-bid meetings, hold a bid opening, evaluate bids, take the recommended bid to board for award, get contract signatures, and...
read moreThanks for visiting CalSave
