Http://procurementbenefit.ucop.edu/



Procurement Services Benefit Bank TitleProcurement Services Benefit BankSubmitted ByPatrick Rogers, Applications Program Manager I (Technical Team Manager)patrick.rogers@ucop.eduProject TeamLeadPatrick Rogers, Technical Team ManagerCRM, Project/Technical Mgmt, UX/UI, DatabaseJudy Thai, Web Support SupervisorCRM, Project Management, QA, UX/UIDevelopersMunjal Shah, PHP DeveloperProgramming, Database, UIRick Kehret, PHP DeveloperProgramming, DatabaseElena Tolpygo Cranley, PHP DeveloperProgramming , DatabaseSusan Lee, Business AnalystRequirements, CRM Aymen Manai, Cascade Developer Design, UI, CRMCandace Jones, Senior Applications ManagerCRM, UX/UICollaboratorsProcurement Services (Customer and Campuses Representative)Erin Riley, Information, Analytics, & Systems DirectorJacquelyn Johnson, Financial AnalystData ServicesHooman Pejman, Data ArchitectSpandana Batta, Metadata AnalystExternal vendor SciQuestConsultancy AccentureTen UC campusesTechnology UtilizedLinux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Open source PHP MVC framework Yii. Javascript framework jQuery. Implementation TimelineThe project was designed and implemented between January 2014 and June 2014. It launched July 2014 and has been in operation, with subsequent rounds of improvement, over the subsequent 10 months until today. IntroductionIn January 2014, there was no automated system in place within the UC to collect, validate and communicate the Benefit (savings) of the system wide Procurement organization. Understanding that having such a system was key to supporting the new systemwide definitions and process with accurate, comprehensive and verifiable reporting, the Procurement Services team partnered with the Web and Application Services team to build a robust web application. Be innovative — present a unique, new, or different solution to a problemThe Benefit Bank represented an innovative approach within Procurement Services to acquiring, maintaining, and collaborating on procurement information across the entire UC system. Prior to the application, benefit data was collected using custom spreadsheets at each campus - recompiled monthly, validated manually, and handled across nine different data systems. No workaround existed for this complex process. Now, the Benefit Bank provides all procurement staff with a tool that fits their business needs precisely and upgrades their conventional, day-to-day work processes for documenting and auditing benefit data. The Benefit Bank also generates some new wins for Procurement Services, such as creating better opportunities for Procurement to capture and prevent missed benefits more proactively. When a procurement process misses out on a potential benefit (savings), this is recognized much more quickly than it was with manual data collection activities in the past. Procurement engages with business units after a missed benefit, advises them how to save money on future purchases, and improves the business unit’s budget in the next available cycle rather than months or years later. One example of this was the purchase of dental kits at a campus dental school. A missed benefit was identified when dental kits were purchased at a high price from one vendor while identical kits were available at a lower price from another. The instant documentation of this in the Benefit Bank alerted Procurement and helped them to quickly raise the issue with the school and influence future purchasing for the next school year.The application also creates unexpected new business process and knowledge transfer opportunities. For example, procurement staff can search completed benefits to get ideas on how to better negotiate similar benefits they are currently pursuing. This collaboration opportunity is available automatically and systemwide across campuses as benefit data grows over time. The procurement staff does not need to make any special effort to organize the information and publish it for their peers. Improve operational efficiency and usability/accessibilityThe Benefit Bank enabled the 230+ users at all 10 campuses and Office of the President to efficiently integrate this new data collection process into their daily work with very little disruption. Accurate reporting of the Benefit (savings) professional Procurement individuals are delivering back to the system in support of the UC core mission is key to Procurement being a strategic partner that is essential to the financial health of the University. Prior to the Benefit Bank, campuses found it difficult to keep track of procurement performance at other campuses and to understand the overall status of procurement activities systemwide. Because of the Benefit Bank, all data is collected in one place, enforcing consistency and transparency in how the data is collected and reported. Now, every user who logs in sees accurate, up-to-date systemwide performance right on their dashboard. This helps everyone involved in the procurement effort to better grasp the big picture of procurement work across the UC system.The Benefit Bank enables accurate and verifiable reporting through simplified processes and facilitates valuable, fact-based communication, by ensuring measures are explainable, transparent, and can be clearly understood by internal and external stakeholders. The tool is dynamic and scalable – supporting current objectives within the organization, adapting to continuous improvement, and resulting in significant lean process efficiencies within each of the Procurement departments across the UC system.Be shareable and readily implementable elsewhere at the UniversitySimply put, this tool can be made available to new users, wherever they may be in the university, by simply signing them up. This is due to a balanced design process for the Benefit Bank, which included looking far enough into the future to easily accommodate predictable growth, but not so far as to overcomplicate the development process and put it at risk. The application is well-suited for use by UC Medical Centers, and is currently being extended to travel procurement. Its data structure and codebase even make it possible to easily deploy elsewhere at UC or even beyond UC. Procurement Services presented the Benefit Bank at a recent conference, after which Texas Tech and Emory expressed an interest in licensing the application. This serves as a testament to how well fit the Benefit Bank is to its business purpose. Thoughtful design, and a commitment by the entire build team throughout the development process to fully meet the business needs, resulted in an application that is not only technically easy to implement elsewhere at the University, but also appeals to procurement groups with a similar mission at other organizations. Be interoperable and integratedThe Benefit Bank leverages the extensive IT infrastructure and support services of UCOP. It resides on virtual application servers, database servers, and DNS management all provided by ITS units. Initial data for the application was collected and managed within Sharepoint, certain key data within the application is provided by external vendor SciQuest, and data can be exported from the application on demand for consumption by related applications and processes such as data visualization using Tableau. The Benefit Bank does more than just integrate with existing Procurement business processes and services. It has become a key element of procurement efforts, integrating with and facilitating related business processes, and even making new and unexpected collaboration and information-sharing processes possible where previously they were not feasible enough to provide the beneficial impact that they do on a daily basis today. Demonstrate collaborationThe Benefit Bank launched in July 2014 after months of focused, dedicated time from a cross-departmental team comprised of Procurement Services, Data Services, Web Application Services, external vendor SciQuest, consultancy Accenture, and all ten UC campuses. Working between business organizations is not an easy task and can often result in misunderstood objectives and missed deadlines. This was not the case with this project. The Procurement Services department did not previously have a strong working relationship with ITS since many of their services are hosted by external vendors. This project gave these two teams the ability to work together collaboratively with a high level of mutual respect, where different viewpoints were valued and each team member exhibited collegial interactions which positively influenced the project.This work demonstrates an ability to work together to advance the UC mission by creating an innovative tool that has significantly impacted systemwide users not only through an increased emphasis on Benefit identification and generation but also has resulted in significant lean process efficiencies within each of the Procurement departments across the UC system. For example, campuses can now focus greater effort on reporting good data rather than managing the complex Excel spreadsheets that they used prior to the Benefit Bank, or keeping up many different individual Sharepoint sites plus other homegrown applications used for tracking. Audits and approvals happen just a few clicks away from data entry. Shared use of the same application helped drive executive level approval at the campuses of shared definitions of valid business data and process, again redirecting effort from managing differences into completing core business activities. Demonstrate assessable success criteriaProcurement Services began the process of building the Benefit Bank after setting the lofty goal of saving $200 million annually by FY 2017 in the course of executing procurement functions across the UC system. The Benefit Bank has now been in operation for 10 months of the 2014/15 fiscal year, with over 1200 benefit transactions approved systemwide. As of the pending April closing, the Benefit Bank will document over $147 million dollars in savings – already exceeding the goal of $140 million for this fiscal year, with two months left to go. While procurement units across UC worked in isolation to acquire significant benefits before the application was developed, it was only after the Benefit Bank was launched that everyone involved achieved easy systemwide visibility and a stronger sense of the shared effort to reach the $200 million dollar mark. ................
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