Customer: Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission Procurement Division

Prime Contractor: Business Promotion Consultants, Inc. (BPC)
Subcontractor:  None

Project Description

The Challenge:

The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC) desired to acquire and implement an Enterprise Resource Planning/Enterprise Asset Management (ERP/EAM) system. A contractor was brought in to manage the overall ERP/EAM acquisition. BPC was brought in to support the Procurement Division’s participation in the ERP/EAM acquisition and to develop a definition of the functional requirements of the Procurement Division for the ERP/EAM solicitation.

The Work: 

To develop the Procurement Division’s functional requirements definition, BPC:

• Reviewed past management studies and consultant reports advising various reorganization and automation options;
• Received a briefing from representatives of the agency-wide re-engineering team, to understand their approach and findings;
• Met with the ERP/EAM facilitation contractor, to understand their acquisition approach and input expectations from BPC;
• Reviewed Procurement Division policies and guidelines to determine the legal operating environment for procurement activities;
• Interviewed Procurement Division management and staff to map work process, determine distribution of workload and basis, identify individual variations in overall process and probable cause, evaluate utilization of existing automation tools, and assess responsiveness of automation tools to procurement management and staff expectations.

 
The Benefits: 

BPC integrated our observations and findings in a report submitted to the Procurement Division. The report included:

• Draft functional requirements definition for inclusion in the agency-wide solicitation;
• Process improvement recommendations for the Procurement Division during the ERP/EAM acquisition;
• Process improvement recommendations following implementation of the ERP/EAM system.

BPC’s functional requirements definition for the Procurement Division was incorporated into the ERP/EAM solicitation, and the solicitation was issued. Subsequently, a change in WSSC senior management personnel resulted in a lowered priority for the ERP/EAM system acquisition at that time. No award was made, no ERP/EAM system vendor was selected.