Behind the Contract: How We Built the Backbone of a $17M Procurement Operation
A $17M procurement contract. Over 900 items. Five stakeholder groups. And a six-month acceleration of the deadline. Here’s how we built the systems and workflows that made it possible—without a single piece of off-the-shelf software.
Man working at a multi-monitor workstation tracking logistics and operations in a large-scale coordination center.
When Industrial Management Services (IMS) brought Bee Social Solutions in to support their $17M subcontract with Lockheed Martin, the need wasn’t just about sourcing and purchasing. It was about building infrastructure—quickly and precisely—for a contract that would span years and involve hundreds of moving parts.
Our job?
Create a system that could handle it all:
900+ items tracked from request to delivery
Multiple approval checkpoints
Evolving deadlines
Hundreds of quote variations
Over $200K in negotiated savings
All of it done in Excel.
A System Built for Scale
We built an internal procurement dashboard that logged every single item with real-time status updates:
To be ordered. Ordered. In transit. Delivered. Open issues. Requoting. Questions. Removed from scope.
Every change was timestamped, tracked, and visible—no hunting through emails or Slack threads to figure out what was happening.
Cross-Company Collaboration That Worked
With stakeholders across five entities—Bee Social, IMS, Lockheed Martin, dozens of vendors, and Lockheed’s freight broker—we created and implemented workflows that aligned executive expectations with procurement realities.
Funding requests were standardized and logged.
Purchase approvals had clean paper trails.
Vendor issues were escalated and resolved without slowing the pipeline.
Weekly updates kept everyone—from accounting to leadership—in the loop.
We didn’t just build a dashboard.
We built trust across organizations with real-time visibility and responsive systems.
Delivering Under Pressure
Originally scheduled for completion in June 2026, the project deadline was recently moved up to December 2025.
Despite the compressed timeline, our systems and strategy have positioned us to meet 90% of the delivery targets on time, with only 10% delayed due to vendor-side constraints.
Not Just Software. Strategy.
This wasn’t about fancy tools. It was about thinking like operators—knowing how and where decisions stall, and preempting those pain points with clear systems and communication loops.
And that’s exactly what we delivered.
This post is part of our Behind the Contract series, where we break down what it really looks like to support subcontractors behind the scenes—building systems, solving operational friction, and helping teams deliver under pressure.
More insights (and real-world takeaways) coming soon.