Public Procurement Automation

Customer

The customer is a large Russian Federal Agency that is proactively using public purchases in its business activity.

Problem Overview

The customer was faced with new legislative regulations that imposed strict requirements on procurement process. The breach of regulations may result in procurement results' protestation and cancellation.

The procedures used customer personnel to prepare procurement documents were not automated. All documents were made by manually using Microsoft Office: requests for proposal - in Microsoft Word, main stages were tracked in Microsoft Excel, reports were written by hand on pre-printed forms.

Considering new rules that mainly set up new time-constraints and restricted procedures execution, the customer could not rely upon old outdated practices any longer as they might result in transactions cancellation and financial loss.

The new procurement system was designed to automate procedures, namely but not limited to:

• Registration of customer needs in goods and services;
• Automatic creation of procurement documents and requests for quotations based on predefined templates;
• Flexible documents and templates management;
• Documents workflow management;
• Results of purchase orders placement;
• Tracking of time-constraints fulfillment;
• Creation of reports on results of preliminary purchase plans execution;
• Automatic notifications about upcoming events;
• Implementation of managed internal goods and services listings.

Also the system was designed to be easily extended to support new methods of procurements that were introduced by new legislation.

Technical Description

The solution was designed as a web part for Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and is a typical 3-layered application.

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and xml configuration files are used for storing data. Data management is implemented using stored procedures and a separate layer for data access. Business functions, such as data verification and reports generation, are performed by business logic layer. A separate system service sends automatic e-mail notifications about business events in the system. Visual part of the application is presented by the set of ASP.NET controls, consolidated into a single SharePoint Portal Server module.

A special feature of the system is usage of template files to generate report documents in MS Word и Excel formats. Interaction with MS Office applications is performed using standard Office API и .NET Framework.

Benefits

• Quick, effortless and error-free creation of requests and their documentation;
• Strict control over time-constraints adherence and in-time execution of prescribed procedures;
• Quick and easy search for information about procurement initiatives and their current status;
• Fast and error-free reports creation according to given parameters;
• Most manual tasks are automated allowing customer's personnel to give more time and attention to other key duties;
• All time and procedural constraints are automatically monitored significantly decreasing the possibility of law prescriptions unintentional breach;
• Automation resulted in significant efficiency increase, personnel greater dedication and increased ROI.