Transforming Procurement: Integrating & Analyzing

The customer was using Ivalua’s Public Portal as a way for Suppliers to self register to receive bids according to their approved UNSPSC commodities. The State leadership encourages and promotes diversity vendors across all State Departments and thus, many of the state issued Solicitations have diversity goals especially targeted to Minority Women Owned business (MWBE). Following challenges were identified:

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• Suppliers were not identified on the Ivalua system as MWBE vendors which lead to Minority vendors completely missing being notified of solicitation unless their UNSPSC code matched the commodity code on the solicitation. 

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• State has a completely different agency that manages the MWBE certification process and thus uses a 3rd party tool - B2GNow which is different from the Ivalua system.

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• There was no way for the supplier to self identify as MWBE supplier.

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• Prime Suppliers were not able to identify MWBE suppliers from the State on the Ivalua system and had to rely on the B2GNow directory (another website) to include them in RFP responses that are tied to diversity goals.

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• Issued contracts did not show the subcontractor with correct diversity information.

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• State did not have a way to report on MWBE awarded contracts from the Ivalua System or from State’s financial reporting platform.

• Update an existing Ivalua Supplier record with the appropriate B2GNow Certification details with appropriate major specifications.

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• Update an existing supplier’s minor specification as it keeps changing very often.

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• For a supplier that does not exist in the Ivalua system, but is certified by B2GNow by the State's department, a shell record of supplier gets created and vendor is notified with a link to finish the registration process in Ivalua. This makes the new supplier part of the Ivalua system, increasing and promoting the Ivalua solution and providing a bigger pool of competitive suppliers.

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• Suppliers were informed 90 days before the expiration of their Minority Business status. This gave ample time to suppliers to file for renewal with the authoritative agency.

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• Procurement officers can tag awarded Contracts tied to Diversity goals with the appropriate MWBE supplier and appropriate goals target.

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• Nightly feed of approved Ivalua Contracts meta data pushed to State’s Financial Reporting Business Intelligence system, that provided a clear view of financial commitment by the Prime supplier to diversity sub contractor(s). 

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• Prime suppliers can identify MWBE suppliers to include into their bid responses as a subcontractor.