A crucial aspect of maintaining a fair and compliant procurement system within UMass is our competitive process. Per the Board of Trustees UMass Procurement Policy, goods or services that cost $50,000 or more and are not on an existing contract will require a competitive procurement process that the UPST Sourcing Team must support. In January 2025, the bid/sourcing request intake process was moved from the Salesforce case management solution to BuyWays. This move opened many opportunities for the UMass end users, including end-to-end access to the procurement process, making BuyWays your centralized hub for all procurement-related activities, leveraging workflows for review and approvals automation, and proactive engagement of risk management reviewers.
End-to-end Access to the Procurement Process
The transfer of the sourcing intake process from Salesforce to BuyWays ensured end users could access every procurement-related transaction in one tool, BuyWays. This ensures that transactions can be tracked from one process to another across all BuyWays modules while leveraging already existing requester information, improving efficiency. The immediate impact is that the sourcing intake is now linked to sourcing execution, enabling data transfer and eliminating the need for the sourcing team to transfer that information from one tool to another manually.
Workflow Enabled Transaction Review & Approval
Gone are the days of emailing stakeholders or manually entering their names in DocuSign to gather their approval for a sourcing event. By leveraging the workflow capabilities within BuyWays that support other procurement processes like Requisitions, completed requests are automatically routed by leveraging the financial (speedtype) and commodity code information to route to the appropriate department approver while also leveraging commodity information and answers to specific questions to route to the appropriate UPST Category Manager or risk reviewer.
Because of this workflow enablement, requesters and approvers can see the status of their sourcing requests and which approver or reviewer has it, increasing overall process transparency and visibility.
Proactive Risk Reviewer Engagement
When we go to the market to solicit new suppliers for goods and services you and your campus need, we must ensure that potential risks the request may pose to the University are understood and mitigating strategies are identified upfront and included in the bid event documents.
The risk questionnaire included in the new Sourcing Request Form, part of the sourcing intake process, contains risk questions focused on information security and credit card information (tied to the Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance requirements). When these risk reviews are triggered, UPST will work with the department and the risk reviewer to determine mitigation strategies that need to be adopted for that specific event, which will then flow to downstream processes like contract management.
Finally, although the bid/sourcing process is used by less than 5% of procurement end users, UPST is committed to training everyone who wants to learn more about the new tool or the strategic sourcing process. We continue to offer training sessions and the UPST Office Hour as resources. You can review the initiative’s project page, New Sourcing Request Intake Process, for detailed information and resources. Email us at upst@umassp.edu and include “BuyWays Sourcing Request Form” in the subject line for immediate support.