Seattle City Light Modernizes their Procurement System

SCL digitizes their manual document intake process to a state of the art electronic forms and processing system

Highlights

  • TEAM IM’s Modern UI for WebCenter provided the platform which was easily extended to incorporate the complex Procurement Intake e-Form to meet the precise needs of SCL.
  • Well documented SCL Business Requirements, allowed the Project team to quickly create the Requirement Traceability Matrix and Application Design artefacts required to begin development and configuration of the system.
  • TEAM IM’s robust design, build and deployment processes established the platform for rapid application development, deployment and testing/ user feedback cycle critical to an Agile project.
  • This agility allowed the Project Team to accommodate changes mid project, by consolidating additional ‘small purchase’ procurement processes.
  • A robust testing regime by SCL, combined with frequent end user interaction provided continuous feedback to the Project Team, which resulted in the delivery of a high quality, fit for purpose product.

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.
 

Project Details

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

This 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.

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.

TEAM IM’s Modern UI, provides a modern user interface, extending the life of the Oracle Web Center Content Management Platform. The RESTFul integration layer shipped with the Modern UI also eases integration with other SCL systems like Oracle PeopleSoft Financials.

As one of the largest U.S. public utility providers, the need was paramount to upgrade SCLs manual paper-based document intake process, to a state-of-the-art electronic method with the ability to flex and expand with our growing needs.This challenge was met using a collaborative effort by the team and engaging key stakeholders from multiple departments. Understand the gaps in the current process and future needs allowed for a comprehensive electronic solution to be developed.As a result of our efforts, user adoption has quickly skyrocketed after launch to above 60%. This new tool brings transparency to a process that was previous viewed as a blackhole. Countless user work hours will be gained using this tool and will create a significant savings and process efficiencies improvements.
Kimberly Rayray
Contracts & Procurement Manager, Seattle City Light (SCL)

Value Added

  • Streamlined and consolidated multiple Contracts and Procurement business processes.
  • Significant time saving for all SCL staff involved in procurement through digitization of a previously email and paper driven process.
  • Improved data quality due to e-Form driven data capture and validation which forces completeness and validity of data and record attachments.
  • The system automatically saves critical records and data, reducing and removing the opportunity for errors and omissions during the process.
  • A robust audit trail of all data, attached records and all workflows steps and decisions is available for downstream compliance audit or information requests
  • Easy to use search and dashboard functionality make it easy to find in-process and historical procurement cases.
  • Workflow controls the process to ensure cases are attended to promptly and in accordance with published service levels.
  • Improved customer service with enhanced traceability and security

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