Case Study
The City of Banning is a growing community in Riverside County. It’s history is still evident in the occasional stagecoach passing through it’s quaint downtown, close to where hundreds of new housing units have been built. A new road, school, and other infrastructure projects are now in the pipeline to support thousands of new residents to Banning.
Software That Empowers
Shiloh Rogers’s first job out of high school was in government procurement and purchasing, and she’s been doing it ever since. Rogers accepted the job of Banning’s Purchasing Manager after spending about a decade in Procurement for the City of Riverside. While the volume of projects in Banning was lower than in Riverside, she described the “busy-ness” as being the same.
The culprit: a legacy bidding system and heavy reliance on emails and word processors.
“When systems are too complex and hard to use, people avoid them and revert back to paper. So, you might as well not have them at all.”
Shiloh Rogers, Former Purchasing Manager, City of Banning, CA
Customer Results
5x more bids
Hours→ seconds for processing time
Validation tools cut review time
Easy to use for new staff and vendors
When Rogers first started, she said two-thirds of her time was spent downloading, printing, interoffice mail, and moving giant stacks of paper around. With a pipeline full of development projects ahead, Rogers needed to unlock capacity. “OpenGov Procurement empowers my team — it doesn’t tell us how to do our jobs, it enables us to do them better and faster,” she explains.
Rogers reports that her favorite OpenGov Procurement capabilities are: built-in templates that make changes to vendor submission requirements simple, vendor questionnaires that save time by creating uniform responses, and validation tools that enable quick review for minimum qualifications.
Adopting software to streamline procurement workflows didn’t just reduce team time and save paper, it also attracted more bids. Prior to implementing OpenGov Procurement, it was not uncommon for the City of Banning to get just one or two bids on a project. Now, they report regularly receiving 8-10 qualified bids.
Software that Surprises You (in a good way)
With OpenGov Procurement, the purchasing team in Banning was able to simplify and bring efficiencies to cumbersome and time consuming processes for the whole team, including new staff members and those who aren’t day-to-day users of the software.
Just last year Rogers was surprised when a new employee created an RFP for the very first time. He had never made one before and she was impressed with how “perfect” it was. When she reached out to him, he told her he just followed the guides and steps within OpenGov Procurement. He said that even though he had never done it before, he figured it out easily.
Rogers is also impressed with how easy it is for evaluators and vendors to use. Often proposal evaluation teams include employees who normally work out in the field and don’t spend much time in front of their computer. She says it’s easy for them to access the proposals and participate in the evaluation process.
A Company that Listens
Rogers has worked with other e-procurement platforms during her career. OpenGov Procurement stands out above others. The features and functionality have helped her streamline Banning’s procurement experience. But more importantly for her, the company listens to her feedback and is responsive to her needs.
“Even before we had signed the contract, they built functionality into their platform based on feedback I gave them during their product demos,” said Rogers. “Continuous improvement means everything to me.”
Suggesting that government agencies need to be more open to working with cloud software providers, Rogers added: “when systems are too complex and hard to use, people avoid them and revert back to paper. So you might as well not have them at all.”
Ready to get started?
Or call (650) 336-7167