cividas PROCUREMENT enables the Administration to manage their procurement and tendering procedures with a higher level of efficiency by optimizing their use of available resources and ensuring neutrality during the procurement process.
A lot of financial resources are usually spend on the procurement processes and therefore managing this process in an effective and efficient manner is essential, obtaining the highest performance of the available resources. Moreover, it allows decision makers to maintain an optimal, fair and transparent selection process.
The easy access to information about competing suppliers and electronic availability of information are a driving force for competition among suppliers and a source of support for decision making. Moreover, the advantages of the solution being based on the cividas e-GOV platform, improve the internal organization and the distribution of the tasks involved in the procurement process.
A Spanish medium-sized city council manually managed its recruitment procedures in 2011. Previously they had tried to implement a software solution, but for various reasons this had not been successful.
Procurement procedures are done by many different areas within a municipality. Whether it is about building a new library, hire a transport company or buying new uniforms for the gardeners, every area must be able to start and execute its own procurement procedures.
It is not only about making requests, it is also about being able to manage the preparation of contracts, publishing and tracking them and performing actions such as billing. All these tasks and the number of council areas that have to be able to perform them, give an idea of the importance of being able to efficiently manage these procedures.
The council needed to find a solution that would streamline the procurement processes as well as improve the lives of their citizens, because delays were causing slow responses to urgent problems and resources were lost due to having to do paperwork and perform repetitive tasks.
Moreover, it was necessary to facilitate the work of suppliers and to increase the visibility of contests. They wanted to reach the best possible suppliers by increasing the level of competition in contests and obtain the ability to identify the most advantageous offers.
The government team of the City Council decided to take action and finally implement a solution for managing these types of procedures, in order to be able to meet the needs of public employees more efficiently and fully eliminate manual procedures.
In 2011, the government team decided to implement cividas PROCUREMENT, starting with the definition of procurement procedures for all the different areas of the municipality, including monitoring, publication and the creation of invoices.
The solution allows the management of all types of contracts (less, open or restricted, negotiated with or without publicity or with competitive dialogue) and covers all phases of each process. Even though each contest has its own characteristics, procedures should be standardized thought the entire municipality and for all types of contracts.
One of the stages where the municipality managed to eliminate work was the publication of tenders. Thanks to the connector of the State Procurement Platform, it was possible to extract information and automatically publish contracts on the platform, saving the trouble of having to re-enter this data. In addition, tenders also were automatically published in the Electronic Town Hall and in official newsletters.
To facilitate the creation of invoices, the digital signature implemented by cividas PROCUREMENT provided the ones responsible with the ability to approve the invoices submitted by suppliers from anywhere and at any time.
After a process of training, public employees began using cividas PROCUREMENT and quickly found the advantages of working this way in comparison to working the way they had worked before.
Thanks to the support of their employees, the government team was able to implement a solution that significantly improved the image of the city council from the perspective of their suppliers, who now began to see them as a reliable and efficient customer.
Because the town hall was now more transparent, the opinion of the public improved as well. All information on all contracts were published, allowing the citizen to see exactly how public resources were spent.
The interest in the solution increased quickly, because many of the workers using cividas PROCUREMENT started to demand cividas being used for other areas as well, such as urban planning, intervention, public order, tax collection, etc.
Today, cividas is present in all areas of the city council and is used by 90% of the workforce. This is a big success for the government team, which did not give up after their first attempt to eliminate manual work and finally discovered cividas, which allows them to use the resources of the city council in a better, more efficient way and facilite the work of its employees.