Procurement Services Benefit Bank
http://procurementbenefit.ucop.edu/
Project Title
Procurement Services Benefit Bank
Submitted By
Patrick Rogers, Applications Program Manager I (Technical Team Manager)
patrick.rogers@ucop.edu
Project Team
Lead


Patrick Rogers, Technical Team Manager
Judy Thai, Web Support Supervisor
CRM, Project/Technical Mgmt, UX/UI, Database
CRM, Project Management, QA, UX/UI
Developers






Munjal Shah, PHP Developer
Rick Kehret, PHP Developer
Elena Tolpygo Cranley, PHP Developer
Susan Lee, Business Analyst
Aymen Manai, Cascade Developer
Candace Jones, Senior Applications Manager
Programming, Database, UI
Programming, Database
Programming , Database
Requirements, CRM
Design, UI, CRM
CRM, UX/UI
Collaborators





Procurement Services (Customer and Campuses Representative)
o Erin Riley, Information, Analytics, & Systems Director
o Jacquelyn Johnson, Financial Analyst
Data Services
o Hooman Pejman, Data Architect
o Spandana Batta, Metadata Analyst
External vendor SciQuest
Consultancy Accenture
Ten UC campuses
Technology Utilized
Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Open source PHP MVC framework Yii. Javascript framework jQuery.
Implementation Timeline
The project was designed and implemented between January 2014 and June 2014. It launched July
2014 and has been in operation, with subsequent rounds of improvement, over the subsequent 10
months until today.
Introduction
In January 2014, there was no automated system in place within the UC to collect, validate and
communicate the Benefit (savings) of the system wide Procurement organization. Understanding that
having such a system was key to supporting the new systemwide definitions and process with accurate,
comprehensive and verifiable reporting, the Procurement Services team partnered with the Web and
Application Services team to build a robust web application.
Be innovative — present a unique, new, or different solution to a
problem
The Benefit Bank represented an innovative approach within Procurement Services to acquiring,
maintaining, and collaborating on procurement information across the entire UC system. Prior to the
application, benefit data was collected using custom spreadsheets at each campus - recompiled
monthly, validated manually, and handled across nine different data systems. No workaround existed
for this complex process. Now, the Benefit Bank provides all procurement staff with a tool that fits their
business needs precisely and upgrades their conventional, day-to-day work processes for documenting
and auditing benefit data.
The Benefit Bank also generates some new wins for Procurement Services, such as creating better
opportunities for Procurement to capture and prevent missed benefits more proactively. When a
procurement process misses out on a potential benefit (savings), this is recognized much more quickly
than it was with manual data collection activities in the past. Procurement engages with business units
after a missed benefit, advises them how to save money on future purchases, and improves the business
unit’s budget in the next available cycle rather than months or years later. One example of this was the
purchase of dental kits at a campus dental school. A missed benefit was identified when dental kits
were purchased at a high price from one vendor while identical kits were available at a lower price from
another. The instant documentation of this in the Benefit Bank alerted Procurement and helped them to
quickly raise the issue with the school and influence future purchasing for the next school year.
The application also creates unexpected new business process and knowledge transfer opportunities.
For example, procurement staff can search completed benefits to get ideas on how to better negotiate
similar benefits they are currently pursuing. This collaboration opportunity is available automatically
and systemwide across campuses as benefit data grows over time. The procurement staff does not need
to make any special effort to organize the information and publish it for their peers.
Improve operational efficiency and usability/accessibility
The Benefit Bank enabled the 230+ users at all 10 campuses and Office of the President to efficiently
integrate this new data collection process into their daily work with very little disruption. Accurate
reporting of the Benefit (savings) professional Procurement individuals are delivering back to the system
in support of the UC core mission is key to Procurement being a strategic partner that is essential to the
financial health of the University.
Prior to the Benefit Bank, campuses found it difficult to keep track of procurement performance at other
campuses and to understand the overall status of procurement activities systemwide. Because of the
Benefit Bank, all data is collected in one place, enforcing consistency and transparency in how the data
is collected and reported. Now, every user who logs in sees accurate, up-to-date systemwide
performance right on their dashboard. This helps everyone involved in the procurement effort to better
grasp the big picture of procurement work across the UC system.
The Benefit Bank enables accurate and verifiable reporting through simplified processes and facilitates
valuable, fact-based communication, by ensuring measures are explainable, transparent, and can be
clearly understood by internal and external stakeholders. The tool is dynamic and scalable – supporting
current objectives within the organization, adapting to continuous improvement, and resulting in
significant lean process efficiencies within each of the Procurement departments across the UC system.
Be shareable and readily implementable elsewhere at the University
Simply put, this tool can be made available to new users, wherever they may be in the university, by
simply signing them up. This is due to a balanced design process for the Benefit Bank, which included
looking far enough into the future to easily accommodate predictable growth, but not so far as to
overcomplicate the development process and put it at risk. The application is well-suited for use by UC
Medical Centers, and is currently being extended to travel procurement. Its data structure and
codebase even make it possible to easily deploy elsewhere at UC or even beyond UC. Procurement
Services presented the Benefit Bank at a recent conference, after which Texas Tech and Emory
expressed an interest in licensing the application. This serves as a testament to how well fit the Benefit
Bank is to its business purpose. Thoughtful design, and a commitment by the entire build team
throughout the development process to fully meet the business needs, resulted in an application that is
not only technically easy to implement elsewhere at the University, but also appeals to procurement
groups with a similar mission at other organizations.
Be interoperable and integrated
The Benefit Bank leverages the extensive IT infrastructure and support services of UCOP. It resides on
virtual application servers, database servers, and DNS management all provided by ITS units. Initial data
for the application was collected and managed within Sharepoint, certain key data within the application
is provided by external vendor SciQuest, and data can be exported from the application on demand for
consumption by related applications and processes such as data visualization using Tableau. The Benefit
Bank does more than just integrate with existing Procurement business processes and services. It has
become a key element of procurement efforts, integrating with and facilitating related business
processes, and even making new and unexpected collaboration and information-sharing processes
possible where previously they were not feasible enough to provide the beneficial impact that they do
on a daily basis today.
Demonstrate collaboration
The Benefit Bank launched in July 2014 after months of focused, dedicated time from a crossdepartmental team comprised of Procurement Services, Data Services, Web Application Services,
external vendor SciQuest, consultancy Accenture, and all ten UC campuses.
Working between business organizations is not an easy task and can often result in misunderstood
objectives and missed deadlines. This was not the case with this project. The Procurement Services
department did not previously have a strong working relationship with ITS since many of their services
are hosted by external vendors. This project gave these two teams the ability to work together
collaboratively with a high level of mutual respect, where different viewpoints were valued and each
team member exhibited collegial interactions which positively influenced the project.
This work demonstrates an ability to work together to advance the UC mission by creating an innovative
tool that has significantly impacted systemwide users not only through an increased emphasis on
Benefit identification and generation but also has resulted in significant lean process efficiencies within
each of the Procurement departments across the UC system. For example, campuses can now focus
greater effort on reporting good data rather than managing the complex Excel spreadsheets that they
used prior to the Benefit Bank, or keeping up many different individual Sharepoint sites plus other
homegrown applications used for tracking. Audits and approvals happen just a few clicks away from
data entry. Shared use of the same application helped drive executive level approval at the campuses of
shared definitions of valid business data and process, again redirecting effort from managing differences
into completing core business activities.
Demonstrate assessable success criteria
Procurement Services began the process of building the Benefit Bank after setting the lofty goal of
saving $200 million annually by FY 2017 in the course of executing procurement functions across the UC
system. The Benefit Bank has now been in operation for 10 months of the 2014/15 fiscal year, with
over 1200 benefit transactions approved systemwide. As of the pending April closing, the Benefit Bank
will document over $147 million dollars in savings – already exceeding the goal of $140 million for this
fiscal year, with two months left to go. While procurement units across UC worked in isolation to
acquire significant benefits before the application was developed, it was only after the Benefit Bank was
launched that everyone involved achieved easy systemwide visibility and a stronger sense of the shared
effort to reach the $200 million dollar mark.