Case Study: Hamilton County, Ohio

Profile

Agency: Hamilton County, OH Population: 835,362 Employees: 6400 in 45 departments Buyers Using Onvia: 287 Onvia Member Since: December 2000 Annual Budget: 2.19 Billion Bid Volume: 200-300 Bids, 200-300 Quotes per year

Agency Challenges

Hamilton County's purchasing authority is governed by the Ohio Revised Code. Departments are required to obtain three quotes for any purchase whose value is between $2,500 and $15,000. Once the purchase value reaches $15,000, a legal competitive bid must be issued unless a state term contract exists, or unless the item or service is available through a cooperative purchasing agreement. Hamilton County's purchasing is decentralized under $15,000. All purchases valued over $750 require a purchase order. For this reason, departments send electronic requisitions to the purchasing department so purchase orders can be created. When requisitions are received in Purchasing, the procurement method used is reviewed for appropriateness before being processed. This requires the departments to mail or fax verification to Purchasing. The manual process used by Purchasing to distribute legal bid documents caused the following hardships:

The County had to create a database of vendors who were interested in bidding on projects. Once created, the database needed to be constantly updated and maintained.

All formal bid documents were copied and mailed to all interested vendors. The cost for postage alone was $18,000 per year.

A bid for any type of technology had 269 registered bidders, and the bid documents cost an average of $6 each to mail for a total outlay of $1,614. This figure did not include staff hours to copy the documents, the cost of the paper, or the cost of packet assembly.

Hamilton County routinely establishes bids that have the possibility of being effective for up to five years if all renewal options are exercised. New vendors, who had not been involved in the process originally, needed historical information on the previous bid in order to make sure they were competitive. This information could only be obtained by a staff member taking the time to sort through hardcopy archives going back 5 years. This process was labor-intensive and inefficient.

Hamilton County processes between two to three hundred legal competitive bids annually. The rate of vendor response was two to three proposals per bid. The mission was very clear: Hamilton County needed to streamline the operation for the purchasing department for legal bids and for the county departments for obtaining quotes.

Solutions Provided by DemandStar

The County saves $18,000 annually in postage alone.

Departments no longer need to search for vendors to provide services and goods. Vendors are at their fingertips.

Calls to County departments are reduced because vendors control their own registration process.

The County's list of vendors grew from 1,600 to 8,000 overnight.

Hamilton County's formal bid process had a participation rate of three. Now Hamilton County's participation rate is 16.6, which is a 553% increase in participation.

Hamilton County's informal request for quote process had a participation rate of three because that was all that was necessary. Now the participation rate is 7.90, which is a 263% increase in the rate of participation. The savings on Hamilton County's request for quotation process over the three-year period that Onvia DemandStar has been utilized are as follows:

• 2001 $223,074
• 2002 $170,581

Onvia DemandStar created a complete verifiable audit trail for all purchases.

Onvia DemandStar's Bid Library eliminates the need for duplication of efforts by departments when creating bids.