Overview
West Valley-Mission College is a public California Community College, offering exceptional preparation for transfer to four-year colleges and universities. The Saratoga campus is located in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, in the southwest corner of Silicon Valley. Having recently celebrated its 50-year anniversary, the 143-acre campus serves 8,056 students with a faculty of 164 full-time and 189 associate faculty employees.
Challenge
Despite its proximity to Silicon Valley, the College relied on many manual and cumbersome procurement processes. Over time, serving the many operational needs became more difficult for the procurement team. The need to streamline and automate the procurement processes became an identified priority for Mina Hernandez, Executive Director of General Services.
Solving Problems through Automation
To build bridges and gain acceptance toward change, Hernandez realized that she would have to “sell” the idea of eProcurement. The PB System™ was brought in for a demonstration. To involve customer departments and those who could impact the automation decision, she invited many of those influencers into the demo. And it worked. Having a broader audience—not just procurement—view the capabilities of the system for themselves and have the ability to ask questions about scenarios that might directly affect them, made a huge impact. The ultimate decision was to move forward.
Results
- Departments outside of Procurement saw the benefit of the PB System™ after experiencing a demo and were on board to sign up with PlanetBids.
- Customer departments can now implement their own online quick quotes for smaller dollar purchases.
- All contract files are now in the system, rather than multiple files on individual computers, notebooks, and spreadsheet systems.
- The vendor pool has increased with expanded outreach.
- PlanetBids-generated reports, with charts and graphics, are easier to produce and more comprehensive.
Benefits of eProcurement
“It might surprise many that rolling out an eProcurement system is a lot easier than you think. Once committed to the selection of the modules, and dedicating resources to work with the PlanetBids team, a typical implementation plan can take from 2-8 weeks, depending on the number of modules procured. From initial planning and design followed by system configuration and testing to ultimate acceptance, training, and launch, it really is one of the fastest and easiest IT transitions that can take place for a large government organization. After implementing systems for hundreds of government procurement offices – both big and small – the framework is already in place. Take those time-consuming manual processes and automate today!”
Mina Hernandez, Executive Director of General Services
Chosen PB System™ Solutions
- 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.
- 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 realtime verification of provided information (licenses and certifications) against third party databases, generate comprehensive reports with visual charts, and broadcast messages to selected vendors.
- Insurance Certificate Management enables risk, procurement, public works, and contract administrators to automate, maintain, and retrieve up-to-date relevant information regarding vendor or contractor insurance certificates. Paired with My Insurance, agencies and vendors can conduct all insurance related tasks virtually within the PB System™.
- Business Certification/Prequalification Management allows an organization to manage their certification programs such as Small Business Enterprise, Minority, or Diversity as well as Contractor Prequalification(s). Agencies can manage, maintain, and retrieve up-to-date information on vendor certifications and prequalifications. Registered vendors have access to viewing certified/prequalified vendors for potential subcontracting opportunities.
