UMass has come a long way regarding Procurement Transformation, moving from a decentralized procurement strategy, non-standardized processes, and multiple unconnected technologies, spaghetti factory, to a cohesive procurement strategy based on talented staff, automation-driven process enhancements, and harmonized policies.
Over the last five (5) years, various programs were embarked on to move the maturity level of the procurement services within UMass. Let's dive into major projects performed in our Procurement policy areas that drive eProcurement (BuyWays system) improvement with campus stakeholders.
Procurement Policy Operationalization
The harmonization of six separate ways of working into one drove the need to create a guided buying process and automate forms in BuyWays. In addition the modifications needed to align to the Board of Trustees approved Procurement Policy that dictate purchasing threshold by commodity types. All of this work culminated in automating the No-Bid Justification (NBJ)process and FY24 general ledger account code rationalization and alignment to procurement commodity codes. Ensuring the availability of a single source of truth regarding purchasing activities and their alignment to system accounting/finance requirements.
Purchasing Agility
Focus on leveraging existing tools while adopting innate automation capabilities. This is exemplified by stretching the capabilities of the BuyWays workflow to enable risk management and compliance needs in purchasing, invoice processing, and contracting processes. This project improved transparency, reporting, partnership with Human Resources, Office of the General Counsel (OGC), Information Technology, and Treasury and other stakeholders.
Invoice Intake and Payment Optimization
Drive to limit manual invoice submission while improving automation is a major win for UMass. The team rationalized the manual invoice submission process to one and leveraged campus stakeholders to drive supplier invoice submission to invoices@umassp.edu while also leveraging optical character recognition (OCR) to record manual invoices in BuyWays with minimal human intervention.
PROJECT CASE STUDY
Contract Process Streamlining & Automation
The transformation of the UMass contracting process took about three years to get to where we are today. We moved from a disparate adoption of the BuyWays Contracts module to where all contracts are managed and stored centrally in BuyWays. The project, aptly named Project Metamorphosis (Project MET for short), was carried out in three phases, and we are grateful to our campus stakeholders for their patience throughout this project.
Project MET Timeline
- Phase I: In 2021, we focused on strengthening the Contract Request process and bringing all UMass stakeholders (OGC, Treasury, Grants, IT, and others) into the BuyWays platform. In addition, we updated the contracting threshold for services under $10,000 to greater or equal to $50,000, adopting a risk-adjusted approach to focus on strategic and higher-risk contracts.
- Phase 2: In 2022, we targeted improved efficiency for the contract request and speed of UPST review and routing, strengthening construction (trade work) and entertainment-related work under $10,000, and automating the Independent Contractor review process.
- Phase 3: In 2023, we focused on automating the contract amendment/renewal process, raising the service contract request threshold to greater or equal to $100,000 from less than $50,000, and added the new commodity code/account code structure.
Project MET Outcome
- Use of the BuyWays Contracts module as the UMass contract repository is at ~100% compared to less than 50% pre-UPST.
- By the end of the Fiscal Year (FY) 2023, the share of under $50K services contract requests reviewed by the UPST contracts team declined from 80% (FY21) to 43% (FY23).
- From FY21 to FY24, the contract requests processed within 0-5 days increased by 142% from 662 (FY21) to 1594 (FY24).
- Finally, we increased transparency and visibility of the end-to-end contract management process, putting data in the hands of end users and enabling them to see where their contract is in the process at any given time.