Meet Jayne, Government Procurement Analyst
Jayne is a Procurement Analyst with the State of CA. She is responsible for getting necessary services and products into the hands of underserved populations that desperately need them, fast.
Let’s look at what her work includes, as it relates to procurement:
- Receiving procurement requests
- Developing procurement packages compliant with Federal, State, and Local regulations
- Publishing the Solicitation and receiving bids
- Evaluating the submitted bid packages to determine award
- Creating and executing the contract(s)
- Collaborating with oversight agencies as necessary*
*In California; the Department of General Services and the California Department of Technology.
9:00 am
Workload Review and Priority
Jayne starts her day by evaluating her current procurement workload and prioritizing activities. With City Innovate’s Document Process Automation™ (DPA) platform, dashboards show her exactly what she needs to do next based on overall project timelines.
This morning, she receives a request for a much-needed service which includes funding information, a preliminary scope of work, and a cost worksheet. Jayne checks to make sure the preliminary procurement request is complete and contains all the documents and information required.
9:30 am
Solicitation Development
Jayne determines which procurement method she is going to use to purchase these goods or services and begins assembling the required documents, appropriate clauses, and inputting key data.
Prior to using DPA, Jayne would copy a past procurement or use a template to assemble the appropriate documents or select those needed from the list of potential documents, often time repeating mistakes that are difficult to catch, taking Jayne and the team out of compliance.
With DPA, Jayne creates a project by selecting the solicitation criteria and answering a few questions. Then the platform automatically compiles the necessary documents and populates required boilerplate language from a centrally-managed repository of templates. As templates are modified in-flight projects are flagged with the option to update. DPA ensures the solicitation is compliant, which is important to Jayne and her boss.
10:00 am
Document Collaboration
Jayne and her colleagues begin developing the non-boilerplate documents within the solicitation.
With City Innovate, all the required, variable boilerplate language and sections are automatically included as a result of the criteria Jayne selected when she created the solicitation. Role-based permissions, comments, messaging, and section assignments enable real-time collaboration with Jayne’s colleagues.
Prior to using City Innovate Document Process Automation, each group, or Subject Matter Expert (SME), had to work on their section independently, and only when it was their turn to provide input. Now, with City Innovate, Jayne and her colleagues are automatically guided to the exact part of the document that needs their attention, and work and review sections simultaneously, saving a great deal of time.
1:00 pm
Solicitation Publishing
Prior to publishing the solicitation, Jayne typically needs to hire a contractor to build an ADA*-compliant web page that houses the solicitation. With DPA, ADA compliance checking is automated.
Another thing that Jayne needs to do at this juncture is to reduce the size of the main procurement document, a process called ‘flattening’ the documents.
With DPA, flattening documents is a breeze, as it is automatically done inside the Document Process Automation platform.
Publishing the procurement
Thanks to City Innovate, Jayne simply presses a button to publish her procurement, giving her time for a much-needed coffee break!
*The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
3:00 pm
Bid Submission and Evaluation
Jayne begins to see vendor submissions
Prior to City Innovate, vendors would hand deliver boxes of documents and a CD, oftentimes to the wrong department. Worse yet, vendors would email submissions oftentimes ending up in the junk, or spam folder.
With City Innovate, the vendor submissions are all done in the system, reducing risks and appeals.
Jayne begins vendor evaluations
Prior to using City Innovate, the Evaluation team had to search for specific vendor answers/responses to questions or requirements within an extensive hard copy document or an electronic submission. Often times this affected scoring, as some team members missed the responses altogether, making Jayne coordinate to reconcile scores.
Now, with City Innovate, evaluations take much less time, as questions are placed in the appropriate document and section with an upload related to the question in line.
Because City Innovate maintains information in the same place, there is no “hunting” for answers, making access to the same information and scoring streamlined for the evaluators.
5:00 pm
Award and Contract
Jayne awards the procurement and moves swiftly into contract development with City Innovate Contract Administration.
Thanks to City Innovate’s Document Process Automation platform, Jayne successfully ends her day with an awarded procurement.
She goes home fulfilled knowing she was able to get critical goods and services into the hands of underserved populations in her community.