Procurement Portal Delivering Time and Cost Savings to the City of Los Angeles

Procuring materials and services in large organizations is typically a largely manual process, involving any number of users and a vast network of dissimilar, often disperse systems, databases, documents, portals, e-mails, WORD and EXCEL files and mainframes.

For the city of Los Angeles, the procurement process was no different. So when they wanted to streamline and accelerate the process, they turned to Instaknow-ACE technology to make it happen.

Using Instaknow-ACE technology, the process was automated reducing the number of manual touch-points to just two - Initial entry and evaluate bids. Automating the process across all systems reduced the vast amounts of manual data entry, typos, errors, omissions, and delays.

Benefits included:

• "Role-based" portal knows what information views/updates are to be allowed for which users.
• Portal shows latest status of user-relevant items instantly. Lead to 90% reduction in "status request" phone calls to purchasing from users
• Faster, more accurate processing across all systems without wasting expensive people time/skills
• No change needed to any other system
• Adapted to and leverages all existing systems
• Enforced all business policies via business rules that can be changed easily
• Applied cross-system validations at every step
• Completely secure. Audit trails and statistics are kept automatically.
• Advanced checks and balances with reminders/escalations as and when needed
• Users and Vendors are automatically alerted via e-mail alerts at certain points in the workflow to reduce status inquiry phone calls
• Generates all required documents automatically
• Handles multiple types of contracts, each with different policies and rules
  • - Spot Purchase <$150K
  • - PT Contract <$150K
  • - Formal Purchase >$150K
  • - Personal Services
  • - Salvage
  • - Emergency response
  • - Special
  • - Software Commodities
  • - Renewable Portfolio Standard
  • - Contract Renewal Notices (CRN)
• Deployed in stages, total elapsed time of five months