Town of Georgina retires its "tender box" and goes digital with bids&tenders

Background 

The Corporation of the Town of Georgina in south-central Ontario serves approximately 50,000 citizens across dispersed municipalities and communities. The 3-person procurement team is responsible for an annual procurement budget of $60M, issuing around 100 public bids annually.

Stirling Munro, a senior strategic sourcing and procurement specialist, came on board to lead the procurement services team for the Town of Georgina in 2016. His team is committed to delivering municipal excellence through innovative procurement, and he spearheaded the transition to bids&tenders.

Challenges

Before implementing bids&tenders, Georgina’s procurement process was very manual and paper based:

• • Bidders had to pick up hard copies of bid documents from the procurement services office. Procurement services would register each bidder and collect their company contact information.
  • The town advertised its opportunities in the paper and online. That meant that new potential bidders were unlikely to hear about the opportunities and, if they did, wouldn’t necessarily want to send an employee all the way to Georgina to pick up the documents.
  • Bidder questions were faxed to the procurement services office, and addenda were faxed to all registered bidders. Keeping track and ensuring all registered bidders received the addenda was time consuming.
  • All documentation was stored in large filing cabinets throughout the office; finding and filing documents added many hours to each project. In fact, the procurement department had a full-time employee devoted solely to administrative work.
  • Submissions were done in hard copy, and town policy required that each bidder submit multiple copies for every evaluator on the project.
  • Procurement services staff would unlock the “tender box” just after closing time, and immediately start inputting the data into spreadsheets to summarize the results. They would then double-check all submissions for mathematical errors, and provide detailed analytics to the requisitioning departments. This would take hours, and sometimes days.
  • Evaluators would use excel spreadsheets to input scores and comments, and then procurement staff would have to consolidate the results. These then had to be reviewed to ensure no errors were made and the evaluations aligned with the original scores. Notes were stored for any supplier debriefs.
  • The procurement team was also responsible for collecting and tracking WSIB, insurance, bonding, bid deposits, and any other post-award documentation, which only added to their administrative burden. This process also added unnecessary risk, as it was up to staff to ensure that documentation and certifications were not lost or out-of-date.

Overall, the process was time-consuming and cumbersome for both procurement staff and suppliers, and it resulted in long days and many hours of extra time for the team to stay ahead of the backlog of projects.

Solution

About one year after starting at the Town of Georgina, Munro had had enough.

After discussions with his counterparts in surrounding municipalities, Munro met with bids&tenders.

Once they chose to implement the platform, Georgina underwent a multi-stage implementation process to ensure a seamless transition to eProcurement.

First, staff were given initial training on the platform basics. This allowed them to begin posting bids on the platform, so at least suppliers were being notified of available opportunities. Second, with the help of the bids&tenders implementation team, Georgina’s procurement office replaced the town’s outdated procurement policies and procedures to align with a complete adoption of bids&tenders.

Once the new policies and procedures were in place, and internal staff had been trained appropriately, the town implemented the remaining modules of the system. In 2018, Georgina was fully equipped to post projects, manage contracts, and receive and evaluate submissions.

Results

The Town of Georgina’s procurement services department had several major goals with the implementation of an eProcurement platform, all of which were met or exceeded by bids&tenders: 

1. Reduction of paperwork

With bids&tenders, the Town of Georgina has accomplished their goal. They have emptied all but one small file cabinet; the office is free of clutter and their processes are all digital.

2. Shorten the project cycle time

The ability of bids&tenders to summarize and compile all the spreadsheet files and analytics has reduced the cycle time for procurement services to provide bid results to the requisitioning departments. Tasks that previously took hours or days are now completed in minutes.

3. Standardize & automate processes

Faced with an ever-increasing workload to support a growing municipality, the team has been able to increase capacity to handle more projects each year without hiring additional staff. This is largely thanks to the efficiencies realized with an eProcurement platform. For example, questions can be answered and addenda issued online and sent to all registered plan takers automatically, eliminating the tedious and cumbersome process of faxing addenda each time.

4. Broaden reach to new suppliers & increase submissions

Georgina’s projects prior to launching bids&tenders had a low number of plan takers; some departments complained that it was the same 1-2 suppliers bidding each time. With the help of bids&tenders’ broad supplier network and notification system, last year the town averaged 11 plan takers, and as many as 40, per opportunity on its 75 awarded projects.

Suppliers have commented that bids&tenders is easy to use; many were already accustomed to the platform as it is widely used in the region. They are pleased they can access projects from their offices and no longer have to travel to get documents or attend bid openings.

5. Reduce/eliminate bid submission errors

With the bids&tenders compliance checker preventing incomplete and inaccurate submissions, the number of bid errors and irregularities has decreased dramatically. This saves the team from wasting time reviewing incomplete or noncompliant submissions – and from having to discard the best submissions for small mistakes or missing information!

6. Streamline the evaluation process

Evaluators have commented on how much more convenient the bids&tenders evaluation module has been. With the previous system, evaluations required going through huge binders of submissions, and recording notes and scores in a spreadsheet that had to be consolidated later. Now, evaluations can take place right inside the platform, from anywhere with an internet connection. All the documentation and bid submissions are stored in the cloud for easy reference.

Supplier debriefs are also much easier now. The project manager can easily run the necessary reports to conduct a thorough, evidence-based debrief.

Final thoughts

To date, the Town of Georgina has awarded over 300 public projects on bids&tenders, and shows no signs of slowing down. While the procurement team has been impressed with the platform as it is, they’ve also been impressed with the ongoing support, training, and platform updates they’ve seen over the years.