Overview
The City of Anaheim, located in Orange County, is the 10th most-populated city in California. Formerly a farming community, its history was changed dramatically with the construction of Disneyland and the advent of increasing tourism and the growing hospitality industry.
The Purchasing Division for the City of Anaheim purchases a wide variety of materials and services for the City’s departments and programs, including the Anaheim Public Utilities, Police, Fire, Community Services, Convention Center, Facility, Fleet, Resort Maintenance, Public Works, Planning, Community Development, and City Administrative offices.
First-Time Automation
Based on market research and recommendations from other local government purchasing teams, the City of Anaheim partnered with PlanetBids to streamline their bid process, eliminate a paper intensive and manual process, and implement an emergency operations management program.
While the City had previously brought on a new financial system, the procurement department found PlanetBids to be more user-friendly and better suited to their needs than their financial systems solicitation module and opted for PlanetBids to integrate with that new system. Bringing on three key modules— Vendor Management, Bid Management, and Emergency Operations —their procurement team started reaping the benefits within the first few bid projects.
The initial implementation stages started with a side-by-side roll-out with the former manual, paper-based system and the newly automated PlanetBids system. Within a short time, both the vendor community and purchasing team moved confidently toward automation, leaving many of the paper processes behind.
Results Using the PB System™
With PlanetBids, the City of Anaheim’s Purchasing team enjoys faster turnaround on bid times and an expanded vendor pool due to the expanded online outreach resulting in increased competition. One of the biggest benefits has been the ability to share information across the system with other buyers and share resources with other organizations. For example, if one buyer is using specifications for one bid, they can easily be copied and assimilated in an identical bid type in another part of the organization.
Another feature that has paid dividends in time and energy for the procurement team is the ability to track all activity on a bid. From the time a bid is initially posted, vendors are electronically tracked when they download documents, acknowledge addenda, submit questions, and propose bids by the deadline—every action is documented. In the event of a protest or concern, the purchasing team has a transparent record of the entire online process to review and assist in making any decisions. This process also helps them minimize a “no-bid” scenario, as they can investigate further if no vendors are participating in a bid process.
ChosenPB System™ Solutions
- Vendor Management is the core of the PB System™ modular suite. It offers a configurable registration process to ensure vendor registrations are complete and unique. Instantly gain access to vendor records, run advanced searches on multiple sets of vendor data, perform real- time verification of provided information (i.e., certifications and licenses) against third party databases, generate comprehensive reports with visual charts, and broadcast messages to selected vendors.
- Bid Management is the most complete web-based system on the market today. Procurement agents can quickly manage the process of issuing, monitoring, conducting evaluations, and awarding formal and informal bids. More importantly, the PB System™ can handle construction and public works projects, a feature unique to the eProcurement industry. Vendors can interactively search, view, and respond to bid opportunities securely over the Internet.
- Emergency Operations module enables an organization to manage, maintain and retrieve up-to-date information 24/7 on vendors that provide goods, services, construction, heavy equipment in the event of an emergency. Users can also search emergency vendors from a master databased shared by other public agencies. As a valuable addition to the existing Vendor and Bid Management modules, this module can be deployed departmentally or across an entire organization.
