SARASOTA COUNTY — Sarasota County’s new procurement official says that headway is being made in improving the county’s beleaguered purchasing department.

“We have good people who are working hard to improve the system, and we are making progress,” Ted Coyman Jr. said in a statement. “We are a service-oriented function, and that means we need to provide a best-in-class product to all areas of county government and vendors, and we need to do it with complete transparency.”