Moving the needle with procurement
Shipping a new civic procurement portal for Paterson, New Jersey
What was the project?
We built a procurement portal for the city of Paterson, NJ, that displays the latest and most eligible opportunities (inclusive of open bids, request for proposals, and request for quotes) for businesses to bid on, a section that shows other upcoming opportunities in the pipeline, and a general FAQ.
While the original Paterson website included information on bids and contact info, it was difficult to navigate, and included a lot of unnecessary information and documents that had nothing to do with procurement opportunities. The only way to get answers was to either drop by in person or to contact the purchasing agent.
This new version is streamlined to include only relevant documents and removes expired listings automatically; the old version did not showcase any upcoming opportunities so we built a page for an embedded airtable (any updates to the airtable will reflect automatically on the website); and we built a separate page for the FAQ that also included a PDF that was previously inaccessible (in the event that a business could not swing by in person or wait on a response).
Some background
The City of Paterson is working with Results for America to improve the way the city communicates with local businesses about upcoming contracts open for bid. The city currently places a newspaper advertisement and then uploads a scanned pdf to the Purchasing section of the city’s homepage.
The city is also engaging with USDR to build an open procurement portal for the city. Many small businesses in the city are struggling to stay afloat because of COVID-19 and opening up access to the city’s procurement can enable local businesses to bid for contracts with the city:
Three-quarters of respondents estimated that they had lost a majority of their revenue
Half of respondents estimated that have lost over 80% of their revenue
The Results for America team interviewed 5-6 local businesses in Paterson to document their knowledge of the city’s procurement processes as well any hurdles they anticipate to face during the application process. The USDR team composed of a team lead, developer, product designer and researcher, and a government liaison. Together, the Results for America and USDR teams also interviewed the Qualified Purchasing Agent for the city to understand current workflows, enabling the final product to integrate well with their current workflow.
Check it out
https://paterson-nj.herokuapp.com/
