Customer stories/

The City and County of San Francisco boosts supplier satisfaction with Skuid

City and County of San Francisco

City and County of San Francisco

The City and County of San Francisco boosts supplier satisfaction with Skuid

As a government agency, the City and County of San Francisco (CCSF) was responsible for sourcing and evaluating bids on its many municipal contracts. However, the bidder portal left a lot to be desired in terms of usability. With Skuid, they built a more streamlined user interface that reduced friction in the bidding process and drove increased supplier satisfaction.

9 out of 10

supplier rating on usability and effectiveness‍

reduced

development time‍s

seamless

integration of PeopleSoft update

The new portal is receiving high marks from suppliers, who tell us it’s much easier to find what they need and to conduct business more efficiently.
Julie Ansell
Julie Ansell

Director of Procurement Systems

Challenge

To make it easier for potential suppliers to bid on contracts, CCSF had created an online self-service bidder portal. However, after implementing a new Oracle PeopleSoft Financials system, they realized that the eProcurement portal they were using for this purpose was confusing and unintuitive.

Suppliers were struggling to register as a bidder and finding it difficult to actually make a bid on a contract. Plus, they couldn’t find the key information they needed to decide whether a particular project was a good fit for their organization. As a result, many of them simply left the site without bothering to submit a bid. 

Fewer bids meant higher prices for CCSF. So Julie Ansell, CCSF’s Director of Procurement Systems, was determined to modernize the look and feel of the system and improve the portal’s navigation. 

The CCSF team first considered building a portal in-house, but quickly decided that would take too long. They needed a solution ASAP to avoid losing out on any more bids. Ansell then turned to Skuid, the only vendor that could meet their demands for rapid implementation and time-to-results. 

Solution

With Skuid, CCSF built a new user interface on top of PeopleSoft that optimized the portal for mobile and matched CCSF’s digital branding. “There was no need to write any underlying code and the solution resulted in a more modern, user-friendly, and secure portal,” Ansell says. 

One major concern was how the new Skuid-built portal would accommodate an upcoming PeopleSoft upgrade. CCSF worried they’d either have to rebuild it from scratch or make substantial changes, which would mean significant downtime for the site.  

The team at CCSF was able to implement their solution in a way that would create no disruption when the PeopleSoft upgrade eventually happened. “There’d be no need to redo the portal or any of the connections to it,” says Ansell. 

The Skuid team had a deep knowledge of PeopleSoft and considerable experience working within the platform which ensured a smoother and faster development process. Ansell and her team didn’t have to invest long hours describing or translating PeopleSoft requirements.

Results

The new and improved portal makes it easy for suppliers to register, bid on contracts, and find key information. It also provides easier access to CCSF’s other partner websites and affiliated databases. 

With the redesigned portal, the CCSF team has seen a reduction in support tickets as well. Suppliers can now find what they need on their own rather than chatting with the help desk. “On the old portal suppliers were spending too much of their time with user support asking questions about how to use the site,” Ansell says.  

Using Skuid, they also embedded metrics tracking into the portal so they could better understand the user journey and gather feedback. And they’ve seen fantastic results around supplier satisfaction. In fact, the majority of the suppliers who’ve used the redesigned site have rated it 9 out of a possible 10 for usability and effectiveness. 

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