Baltimore City Public School System
Before 2005, Paula Cullins, the MBE manager for BCPSS was under tremendous stress. She was spending months extracting and organizing individual prime contractor payment transactions from BCPSS’ Oracle Financials ERP solution so that she could monitor how those payments were filtered into the various contracts. Then she would painstakingly match the payments and contracts against the certified and non-certified vendors. She would also need to assemble a massive spreadsheet to monitor measure the spending and compliance on a month by month basis to put together its annual report on a spend of $200,000,000. In other words BCPSS was using personal heroism to monitor its annual contract spending for compliance.
Cook County, IL
In 2008 The Cook County, IL Government issued a national RFP for a system to:
- Generate, capture and track standardized general RFP/RFQ/RFI and other compliance documents
- Track Certification Applications
- Track All Contracts and payments down to the 2nd tier of subcontractors
At the same time the larger mission of the system was to measure the economic impact of the County’s MBE programs.
As the County moved from a collection of un-integrated spreadsheets to a cloud computing platform the County wanted to optimize its business processes to take advantage of the operational efficiencies that a new system could offer. The PRISM Compliance Management team of business analyst, business process engineers, and compliance professionals re-engineered Cook County's processes and integrated PRISMCompliance.com to improve business processes, reduce paper, and provide accurate reporting. PRISM Compliance Management later introduced a cusomt online certification application. The new application allows vendors to complete ana online certification and submit the application over the web. Although PRISM has a generic certification application, Cook County chose a custom application becuase it closely resembles the paper-based application vendors are accustomed to.
Housing Authority of Baltimore City (HABC)
In 2006, HABC recognized the importance and effect that an automated management system would have on the delivery of customer service, evaluation of the performance of their diversity program, and achievement of target diversity goals. Their manual and paper-based process was literally taking months of planning and work to produce the required HUD 11 and HUD 2516 reports. Additional reports were required for both City of Baltimore and State of Maryland oversight. When the diversity office got the call that the City Council wanted to ask some questions it was late night all hands on deck processes.
One key reason for the length to this process was the painstaking extraction of contract information from HABC’s Great Plains Financial systems. Once the contract and payment information was extracted it had to be matched to prime and sub vendor and certification line by line.
University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS)
Like many hospitals UMMS is increasing its commitment to minority business inclusion. The goal of this commitment is to identify its expenditures with certified minority and women owned business enterprises. As UMMS carefully planned for this increased commitment it identified several areas of concern that could be supported by an automated system.
