Overview
CVG Airport (Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport) has been serving passengers since 1947. Dubbed the Best Airport in North America by Skytrax in 2021, CVG Airport saw more than 7 million passengers in 2022; the airport adds two new airlines in 2023. Today, as the 7th largest cargo airport in North America, it serves as the cargo home to Amazon Air’s primary US Hub and DHL Express Global Superhub. Diversified in both passenger and cargo operations, CVG Airport has an annual economic impact of $6.8 billion.
LaDonna Purcell, CVG’s Director of Contract & Procurement Administration, oversees a sixperson team that handles the contract and procurement needs for the entire operation. In 2014, the organization strategically moved toward automating its purchasing processes. To streamline the paper-intensive operation, the decision was made to move all bids, requests for proposals or qualifications, and even quick quotes to the PB System™.
Early Automation Pays Off
When COVID sent teams home and shuttered normal working operations in 2020, CVG’s move to Automation proved advantageous. Purcell shares that having all procurement activities in the system allowed the team to continue working from home. “We didn’t miss a beat when our teams had to work remotely,” she says. “Having all documents in the cloud allowed us and the vendor community to access them and keep processes rolling, despite the complicated working conditions.”
Purcell advocates further by saying, “With paper-intensive construction projects, it would be very difficult to stay on top of the workload without Automation. It helps with visibility to determine who is registered, what companies downloaded the bid opportunity, and have all the documents easily uploaded.”
Challenge
On the other side of the procurement table, the vendor community embraced the new system. Registering is easy with PlanetBids and currently the airport’s system has over 6,000 available suppliers to compete for their projects. However, Purcell and her team realized that operational departments, which typically aren’t well-versed in procurement, also need to be trained on the system.
Results Using the PB System™
To become more strategic, Purcell offers that analyzing the data and reporting features of the system can help. “For instance, if a supplier registers, attends the pre-bid, but doesn’t submit a proposal, we want to know why. That will help make our solicitations that much better in the future. We also want to develop our contract management capabilities so that the drafting, negotiating, and electronic filing of documents become the norm at CVG.”
When asked if she had advice for other entities who might consider transitioning to an eProcurement system, Purcell states, “Think about your current processes and try to streamline as much as possible. Ask yourself, do we really need this information from all the qualifying suppliers, or can that be handled during the contract award period with the one selected supplier? I highly recommend moving to Automation – just do it!”
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.
- Project Evaluation enables an agency or organization to interactively conduct the evaluation process entirely online. It allows the buying officer and the evaluation committee to fairly assess a bidder’s qualifications and to identify the best proposal – confidentially and impartially.
Buying officers can assign evaluators, set evaluation criteria, attach related documents, communicate with evaluators, and document the entire decision-making process. Proposals can be reviewed and scored without knowledge of pricing. Scoring cannot be challenged and is entirely confidential.
The PB System™ offers two scoring methods: Weighted and a new Rubric method.
Clients also have the option to add additional evaluation rounds, up to four total.
