Overview
The City of Corona is in Riverside County, California, and lies approximately 48 miles southeast of Los Angeles and 95 miles north-northwest of San Diego. Based on recommend-dations from other local government purchasing teams, the City of Corona partnered with PlanetBids to streamline their bid process.
Challenge
One key problem to initially address was the amount of paper waste generated through the manual procurement process. 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.
When eProcurement is considered, an Agency might worry about adoption by the vendor community. For the City of Corona, once the system was implemented, there was increased participation by the vendor community. In particular, the City saw the numbers rise for local vendors who previously thought they couldn’t compete for government contracts. The on-line system made it easy to register and quickly obtain information on upcoming opportunities, thus opening the door for many small businesses.
“Our City Council strives to ensure the city broadens its outreach efforts when advertising Quick Quotes, Bids or RFPs to be as competitive and inclusive as possible. The PB SystemTM Project Summary tool is used by our procurement team to communicate how many vendors are notified, how many of those downloaded the RFP, and the ultimate number of proposals received. Our Council values this tool as they want to reach out to as many vendors/contractors as the city can.”
Andy Ortiz. Purchasing Specialist
Results Using the PB System™
Automated Processes
The highest praise has come from the city evaluator teams. Prior to system implementation, staff would literally use a cart to deliver all the hard copy proposals. Teams who are considering and ranking the received proposals are highly satisfied that they can now review proposals electronically and provide comments along with their scores.
Another huge benefit of choosing a well-established system with hundreds of clients, is the available specification library. Agencies can research the resources within the PB SystemTM library to determine if there are already existing Bid, RFP or specification database for that commodity or service. In one recent example, the city was able to use another RFP template as a resource to build their own RFP for a City-wide wellness program rather than starting from scratch.
In the event of an emergency, authority is given to designated department buyers who can quickly purchase from a preapproved list of vendors and contracts. The city is located in Southern California, where emergencies are a regular occurrence. The Emergency Operations Module can provide an important resource and ultimately, peace of mind.
Chosen PB System™ Solutions
- Vendor Management is the core of the PB System™ suite of modules. It offers a configurable and intuitive registration process to ensure that vendor registrations are complete and unique, avoiding duplicate records. 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), 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 professionals 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 enables any organization to manage, maintain and retrieve up-to-date information on vendors that provide goods and services in the event of an emergency. As a valuable addition to the existing Vendor and Bid Management modules of the PB System™, this module can be deployed departmentally or across an entire organization and works even when internet services are down.
