Over the last four months, many departments and stakeholders across UMass have been working together to revamp the UMass Procurement Contracts process. UMass Admin & Finance SVP and Treasurer, Lisa Calise, is leading this initiative with the UMass General Counsel, Gerard Leone, of the Office of the General Counsel (OGC). Other partners include the IT Information Security, HR, Budget offices, Trademark & Licensing, Research (through the Grants team), UPST, Innovations and Operational Services, Risk Management community, and select campus end users all working with the external consultant, Huron, to ensure that our contracts technology (BuyWays) is optimized to enable a process that works for all of us.
A lot of progress has been made since the launch of this project, such as:
- Defined future state process incorporating stakeholder feedback
- Rationalization of UMass system contract types from 150+ to ~11 (a 93% reduction)
- Development of a contracts template and clause library
- Optimized contract request and review process such that HR, IT, Fund/Budget and Risk reviews are performed within the contracts tool
- Created contract user dashboards that will provide visibility to contract status at the click of an icon
- Working with campuses to streamline the contract approval processes for each campus to ensure this is automated and eliminate manual routing
For more up-to-date information please visit the BuyWays Release 2.0 project page. If you have any questions or feedback regarding this project or the procurement contracts process, send an email to upst@umassp.edu.