The City of Pasadena Onboards New Staff Faster with Automated Solicitation Development
Nestled at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains lies the thriving City of Pasadena, CA, home to the beloved Rose Parade and the prestigious California Institute of Technology.
Despite the City’s popularity, Procurement was not feeling the love. Like many other local governments across the country, the team grappled with turnover and a growing to-do list.
To protect process integrity while reducing the workload (and burnout) for staff, Antonio Watson, a project manager for the City, looked at ways to overhaul the procurement process by focusing on what could be streamlined and automated to ensure compliance and reduce the heavy lift of solicitation development.
Through a Request for Proposal (RFP) process, the City of Pasadena contracted with OpenGov Procurement [https://opengov.com/products/procurement/] to use three key modules to enhance the development and approval of solicitations. Reducing manual work improved the overall efficiency and outcomes for the City while easing the load on staff and reducing the time it took to onboard new team members.
Online Does Not Equal Digital
Pasadena released an average of 337 solicitations per year between 2015 and 2021. However, in 2021 alone, the number surged to over 451 solicitations. To address this surge, the City purchased an online system but quickly realized it did not alleviate the pain of solicitation development.
The City still faced the challenge of pulling together all the right pieces for each solicitation,
and information was still managed outside of the system, requiring team members to hunt and peck in shared files to find what they were looking for each time. The system also did not ensure that each solicitation through bid and contracting was managed in the same place to protect institutional knowledge when team members departed.
“There was something of a spiderweb of data being exchanged between departments, folks who manage different ordinances and processes from legal to public works intersect through purchasing… All of this communication was done manually at the time.” – Antonio Watson, Project Manager, Pasadena, CA
After reviewing multiple software vendors through an RFP process, the City ultimately decided on OpenGov as a “comprehensive tool” that provides electronic bidding and streamlines the solicitation development process.
“We realized very quickly we didn’t just need an e-procurement tool. We needed something to help manage e-procurement and the process, most pointedly, everything leading up to the release of a solicitation.” – Antonio Watson, Project Manager, Pasadena, CA
Building a Process that Could Stand the Test of Turnover
The City rewired the solicitation development process, fostering seamless collaboration with other departments and eliminating the reliance on shared files and static or printed documents. By centralizing solicitation development within a real-time platform, the City no longer relied on cumbersome email threads and track changes to make updates to a bid document.
By including the City’s boilerplate solicitations in OpenGov Solicitation Builder, staff members could swiftly generate and customize solicitation documents, substantially reducing the time and effort.
“For us, it’s critical that we have a system that at least takes some of the judgment calls regarding our standards off the table for certain decisions where, you know, they can reside in boiler plates.” – Antonio Watson, Project Manager, Pasadena, CA
By harnessing the power of templates and boilerplates to construct bids, the City has changed how they train newcomers in solicitation development.
“If six months is considered the benchmark to train a new staff member, we can now get that same person ready in half the time.” – Antonio Watson, Project Manager, Pasadena, CA
This automated and user-friendly tool has alleviated stress placed on existing team members who must pick up the slack when others depart and as new team members train. The value has extended beyond Procurement since any stakeholder or business partner across the City’s departments can now more easily understand the process and be a better partner.
“Now, we can coordinate all of our updates to a solicitation… And it is flexible enough to communicate with different departments, from public works to libraries, in the same way.” – Antonio Watson, Project Manager, Pasadena, CA
By adopting this comprehensive solution, the City addressed the challenges of managing a growing number of solicitations and streamlining cross-departmental collaboration. With these advancements, the City of Pasadena will continue to meet procurement demands while mitigating turnover.
Antonio Watson is a Project Manager for the City of Pasadena, California. In his role in the Finance Department, Antonio’s projects include streamlining procurement processes for the City. His contributions to modernizing the City’s procurement practices have been invaluable in improving overall efficiency and effectiveness in the finance department.
Julia Shanker is a Customer Marketing Specialist at OpenGov. With a passion for storytelling, Julia amplifies the voices of government leaders across the country who are making impactful changes in their communities. Julia has a degree in Journalism and Marketing from Indiana University.
