Many procurement professionals know one emergency call can change their whole day.
Here's a scenario: You get a call from a city engineer about seismic activity in the area that requires a special geological expert through a sole source request, but the engineer doesn't want to complete the necessary paperwork to get a contract in place. What should the procurement manager do?
The answer is simple: Suppliers who contract with government agencies are required to maintain insurance. Period.
Now, we know that for agencies that conduct procurement manually, that's a lot of paperwork. What if you're the one-person procurement office for the City of La Mesa in San Diego County? Procurement negotiates and awards a contract and hands it off to a customer department, which is responsible for making sure the insurance certificates are updated annually.
But the contract manager has a whole other job – managing the contract. Insurance certification is just one extra “to-do” on a long list. But accidents can, and do, happen. A consultant can have a car accident and harm a member of the public, or a contractor may deliver poorly stored chemicals to your plant and harm your agency’s equipment. If the contract manager pulls out the insurance certificate and it is not up to date – or, even worse, can’t be found – the onus is on procurement. The best way to avoid this type of situation is to automate.
One of the biggest pinch points for any type of agency procurement office is the insurance desk. With a myriad of requirements that vary by contract and daily need to ensure all insurance certificates are up to date, the process can be fraught with liability issues.
Hands down, the easiest and most stress-free way to handle the insurance desk is an automated procurement solution. And while agencies fret about how to take their procurement processes online, automation can be a painless and quick process, whether an agency is large or small.
Bay Area Clean Water Agencies (BACWA) transitioned from a manual, paper-intensive process to implementation of an eProcurement system in just two weeks.
"The process went amazingly well," said Jennifer Dyment, BACWA Assistant Executive Director.
"On a scale of 1-10 in level of complexity of implementation, it's been seamless!" added Scott Munzenmaier, Purchasing Officer for the City of La Mesa.
San Diego State University's nine-person procurement team has a 183-page procedure manual on Insurance Requirements in Contracts. SDSU’s website outlines insurance requirements for 13 “common situations” involving activities and business ventures with contractors, subcontractors, and business activities. This includes contracts for instructors, professional services, lessees, vendors, construction, environmental contractors and/or consultants, IT, aircraft chartering, facility rentals, and more.
Even with a large and very organized procurement office, SDSU uses PlanetBids’ Insurance Certificate Management online module.
PlanetBids’ Insurance Certificate Management module enables risk managers, procurement specialists, and contract administrators to automate, maintain, and retrieve up-to-date vendor and contractor insurance certificates. Paired with My Insurance, agencies and vendors can conduct all insurance-related tasks on the cloud with PlanetBids’ PB System™.
After the incident with the consultant who had a car accident, the City of La Mesa now uses the PB System™ to limit contract liability issues. As new contracts are implemented, the system tracks expiration dates and serves as the organization’s insurance database.
For additional information about the PB System™ module for Insurance Certification, contact PlanetBids' procurement experts now.
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