California State Purchase Orders for Fiscal Years 2012-2015

Purchase order data from California's centralized procurement system for contracts over $5000. The dataset covers fiscal years 2012-2013, 2013-2014, and 2014-2015, extracted from the eSCPRS system. It includes tags for Item Name, Supplier Name, Department, and Commodity Title.

Use Cases

• Analyze spending patterns by Department and Supplier Name across three fiscal years.
• Categorize procurement volume using UNSPSC codes and Commodity Title tags.
• Identify frequently purchased items by examining Item Name and Item Description tags.
• Assess supplier diversity by filtering on tags like Dvbe (Disabled Veteran Business Enterprise).

Strengths

• Covers three consecutive fiscal years (2012-2015) of state procurement.
• Includes standardized product categorization via UNSPSC codes.
• Data is scrubbed and standardized through a documented SQL Server process.
• Contains specific procurement tags like Department, Supplier Name, and Commodity Title.

Limitations

• Some purchase orders have multiple UNSPSC numbers, but only the first is used for categorization, limiting granularity.
• The source system (Bidsync) is deprecated, indicating potential data format issues.
• The dataset is limited to California state purchases over $5000, not a national or comprehensive view.

Provenance

Source

State of California Department of General Services via the State Contract and Procurement Registration System (SCPRS).

Collection Method

Extracted from the eProcurement system Bidsync, scrubbed, standardized, and joined from four primary SQL Server tables.

Time Range

Fiscal years 2012-2013, 2013-2014, and 2014-2015.

Freshness

Data is historical, covering fiscal years ending in 2015, though metadata was updated in 2024.

Geography

State of California, USA.