City of Seattle Procurement Support

Supporting City of Seattle's purchasing portal

Highlights

  • Application enhancements include:
    • Extended the functionality of application workflows.
    • Incorporated new Purchasing processes.
    • Developed improvements to the Purchasing Dashboard.
    • Provided an archival process for older purchase requests.
    • Updated Purchase Order lookup processes.
    • Simplified and streamlined security roles and privileges.
    • Improved notifications for reviewers and approvers.

  • Conducted knowledge transfer sessions with City IT engineers on topics including:
    • Application architecture
    • Application functionality
    • Code walkthrough sessions
    • Documentation reviews
    • Testing strategies
    • Application deployment practices

Customer Background

Seattle City Light (SCL) is the public utility providing electrical power to Seattle, Washington, and parts of its metropolitan area. Seattle City Light is the 10th largest public utility in the United States and the US’s first municipal utility to own and operate a hydroelectric facility. SCL is a department of the City of Seattle and is governed by the Transportation and Utilities committee of the Seattle City Council.
 
The Contracts & Procurement (C&P) unit is responsible for acquiring contract services and goods for Seattle City Light. The staff in the unit manage a variety of business processes and documents to ensure successful procurement of critical resources in a timely, efficient, and cost-effective manner. Most of these processes were completely manual with little consistency in methodology, and contract documentation was only available and later stored in hard-copy form. This lack of automated, streamlined business processes can make day-to-day work time-consuming and unnecessarily difficult for C&P staff and SCL business unit representatives. Additionally, utilizing only paper contracts and documents requires significant time in processing, filing, and searching, resulting in missing or lost documentation.
 

There was an opportunity to provide the C&P unit a more effective strategy to complete their work through improved consistency and reliability in documentation. This is upon completing the Enterprise Content Management ECM Procurement Solution project. Successful completion would result in the following enhancements for the business unit:

  • Structured document repository with efficient file retrieval
  • Electronic procurement intake form
  • Streamlined and automated business processes

The Purchasing Portal application project’s high-level goals were to mitigate the risks and problems that arise from using hard-copy forms, improve consistency in processes and quality of deliverables, and improve access and traceability of data and documents for staff and internal customers.

 

Project Details

To achieve the high-level goals of creating a more efficient and secure process, the Seattle City Light (SCL) project’s solution approach was to implement the Enterprise Contract Management Procurement System on top of an existing WebCenter Content (WCC) 12c instance. It contained the following high-level technologies and solutions:

  • Oracle WebCenter Content (WCC) - Used to store all the documents and form object data. This utilizes robust content management features of WCC for metadata tagging, search, security, and workflow. This system was already in use at SCL, so there was no need to implement a new content management infrastructure.
  • TEAM IM - Modern UI for WebCenter Content – An AngularJS frontend and RESTful API for WebCenter, which provides a modern user interface which is easy to further develop to meet the exact business need.
  • Custom developed Procurement Request/Intake Form, enforcing data completeness and validity through robust eForm capability.

Upon conclusion of the “Purchasing Portal Application" project, the City of Seattle engaged TEAM IM to provide support services to complete identified enhancements to the application, provide support for the underlying Oracle WebCenter infrastructure and transition operational knowledge to the City of Seattle’s information technology team with the objective of creating long-term capability within the City’s IT team of maintaining and improving the application.

Being able to partner with our Customer through unforeseen changes strengthened our partnership. I'm so appreciative of the trust the team had in us to not only advocate for them but to create a customized webform within a matter of weeks. We can't always predict what will happen next in the world of technology but at TEAM IM we will always do right by our customers.
Nicole Lunberg
Delivery Lead, TEAM IM

Value Added

  • Enhancements developed for the Purchasing Portal.
  • City employees supported during initial roll-out and initiation period.
  • City of Seattle’s Information Technology team enabled with long-term capabilities for maintaining and improving the Purchasing Portal application.

Software and Cloud Services Involved

  • WebCenter Content 12c
    • Content and metadata management.
  • Peoplesoft Financials
  • TEAM IM Modern UI
    • Built on AngularJS and includes a RESTful API for Oracle WebCenter Content.
    • Modern, intuitive, configurable user interface.
    • e-Forms for data capture, allowing for a modern user interface, sophisticated conditional logic, and data and completeness validation at source.
    • Fit for purpose workflows to conditionally route work to right place.
    • Rich data dashboards showing case data as well as workload statics enabling the City to manage to SLA's more effectively.
    • Advanced search capabilities to help user find the case, document or attachment they are working on quickly.
    • RESTful API to facilitate integration.