The Customer

Miami Dade County Strategic Procurement Department

Strategic Procurement is a division within the Internal Services Department. It is a combination of the former General Services Administration, the Department of Procurement Management and the Construction and Special Project functions of the Office of Capital Improvements.

The Strategic Procurement Division is dedicated to customer service and the timely acquisition and provision of goods and services, design, construction and construction management services. By utilizing technology and sound business processes, it strives to bring the value and service to Miami-Dade County.

The Procurement department at Miami-Dade County handles all the vendor registration, processing, advertisements, requisitions and awarding of bids to the registered vendors.

The Challenge

·      Client was initially looking to automate their manual vendor registration process, further sync the vendor information with their finance and procurement mainframe systems and integrate with thein-house procurement management processes

·      Future vision was to scale up the automation to include the Technical Certification and Pre-Qualification Certification that the vendors needed to renew every 2 and 1 year, respectively

·     One of the challenge was designing a workflow that would integrate the physical bi-weekly technical certification meetings where the recorded decision making of the technical and pre-qualification certifications were taken

Saving time and effort was one of the important goals, along with data security

The Process and Solutions

·       The solution was designed to provide a public facing vendor portal using responsive design targeting a range of devices.

·       An intuitive UI/UX for the vendor registration was designed keeping the process simple enough for the vendors to transition.

·       A Message Center was built within the portal for an effective communication between the vendor and procurement department at Miami-Dade County

·       The portal would become a single point of reference for the vendors to view advertisements for their selected commodities, awarded contracts and maintained vendor information and certifications

·       ETL processes were designed using SQL Server Integration Services to effectively sync data between multiple data sources across systems

·       A robust and configurable workflow was designed to handle the bi-weekly technical certification meetings capturing every data element modification to facilitate enough information for audit purposes

·       Notification processes were implemented to send out regular reminders to vendors regarding new advertisements, contract and certification renewals

·       Modifications were made to the in-house procurement process to include processing of vendor registrations and other modules

Tech Stack-

·       ASP.NETC# MVC 5 & 6, Bootstrap 3, Telerik, Kendo UI, JQuery, WCF, TFS

·       SQL Server 2014 and Oracle 11g

·       SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)

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The Impact

The project was delivered in 3 phases:

·      Vendor Registration

·      Technical Certification

·       Pre-Qualification Certification

Outcome

·      Turnaround time for a new vendor from creating a profile, providing required information to successfully register was reduced on an average from 3 weeks to just 3 business days.

·      The bi-weekly certification meetings shortened from 2 days to just 2-3 hours, along with a significant saving on usage of paper

·      The simple registration process and effective communication allowed more vendors to register, in turn improving competitive bidding for advertisements and generating huge savings for the county

·      Miami-Dade County Vendor Portal has won prestigious awards at National Association of Counties (NACo) and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) 3 years in a row

·      Observing the amazing success and stabilityof the project, a major decision was taken during ERP planning to utilize thevendor portal as it stands. This decision was a significant cost saving for thecounty avoiding the customization expenses for the associated module in the ERP

·      The scalable and configurable ETL processesto sync data between systems provided a smooth transition from mainframe to ERP

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