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A key agency within the New York management wished to introduce a process to save the City's money with streamlined purchase options. While larger purchases were to have a minimum of 3 bids, smaller purchases were draining agencies. |
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| If, for example, one of the Fire Departments' locales was out of photocopy paper, it would be requisitioned, but in the interim they would buy 10 reams. City Auditors determined that this was resulting in millions of taxpayers' dollars being wasted. |
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| The Given |
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| Management of New York City is akin to managing a small country, and its budgetary needs could probably support several countries. Being that the bureaucracy and systems were so large, there were many holes that need to be plugged. The administrators of this particular department (withheld due to confidentiality considerations) put out an RFQ for an application that would help achieve the above. |
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| It was determined that a large amount of money was being spent in small purchases (less than $ 3,000). There was no system or a benchmark in place for streamlining small purchases. |
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| The Needs |
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The need was to provide a simple, effective and a usable system that would be embraced by all NYC agencies. Key concerns of the NYC administration included:
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Fairness and openness in system |
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Lower cost to NYC |
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Enhance agency efficiency |
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Quick turnaround |
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Encourage inclusion of SME's |
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Compliance with ADA & Section 508 laws |
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| Building the software |
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| The core system was designed with ASP using MS SQL database that was already in use with the agency. The process was that SME's would go and enroll for the SIC coded they could supply. At the rollout, the registration of the vendors had t be manual because the archaic City Ordinance did not allow for non governmental individuals or entities to enter information that would go into the core systems - this was perhaps based on security concerns. |
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| Each agency affiliated with NYC was given an internal URL they could access when they needed anything. If, as in the above example, FDNY needed 10 cases of A4 paper, the authorized person would enter the request for 10 cases of A4 paper. The system would automatically map the request to vendors registered to supply A4 paper and send out an automated mail to all those vendors, with bids to be submitted in a few hours. Special notes could be made, e.g. 'Need 60 GSM, 97% brightness paper,' 'Send delivery to Ladder Company 9' . |
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| The vendor seeking a quick order and believing that there could be competitors, would attempt to provide a fair price via the same email. Again, it may be noted that since the NYC systems would not allow it, the bid could not be sent to the core systems, so we wrote a mail parsing component that extracted pertinent information to the standalone MS SQL database. The administrator at the agency would be notified that bids have been received. The bid details would be shown and the administrator would just click the "Award" button next to the bid and the confirmation would be sent out to the vendor with a copy to the requesting officer. |
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Need Analysis |
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Process study |
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Multiple interviews with users - administrators & agencies |
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Proof-of-concept |
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Approval of flow |
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Commencement of coding |
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| Highlights |
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The system received favorable reviews from the various agencies in the NYC ecosystem. |
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We are told that there are 600 vendors on the system today saving the City its precious taxpayers' money |
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The system is Section 508 compliant and speech enabled using our SpeechFirst technology. |
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