 Florida Community College at Jacksonville (FCCJ) is the 10th largest community college in the United States with 5 campuses and 11 centers providing instruction to over 80,000 different students each year in North East Florida.
The college’s Purchasing Department helps create/develop/issue and manage approx. 100 solicitations each year that range from Invitation to Bids, Request for Qualifications (RFQ) and Request for Proposals(RFP) for a wide range of goods and services.
After extensive evaluation FCCJ in the summer of 2006 partnered with Hillsborough CC and entered into license agreement with Sysoft to begin to use their latest eRFP software e-procurement system to help manage the solicitation of RFP’s.
Listed below is a summary of some of the reasons FCCJ decided to begin to use the eRFP system as it included the ability for the college to:
- Have the purchasing dept. efficiently input and utilize FCCJ templates to build our own customized e-RFP’s to be able to quickly reuse them on future solicitations.
- Assign separate access security to System Administrators, Buyers and end user evaluators.
- Allow our Buyers to be able to monitor evaluator progress in their evaluation of proposals to ensure they are complete “prior” to a scheduled public evaluation / caucus meeting.
- Have end users ,through a web browser, input online their initial draft evaluation scores as well as enter comments for each RFP defined criterion “prior” to coming to the public evaluation / caucus meeting.
- Utilize a Proxima projector to simultaneously display in a meeting each evaluator’s initial draft scores and comments which helps Buyers facilitate the networking of evaluation committee members to reach a consensus.
- Have the eRFP system do a number of complex mathematical calculations and assign relative scores for each proposer and each criterion including generation of a final tabulation sheet that can be posted.
- Implement allowing suppliers to online complete a supplier FCCJ registration (TBD).
- Implement allowing suppliers to submit their proposals online which FCCJ projects will expedite the evaluation process (TBD).
- Utilize an eRFP test system to support training of both Purchasing staff as well as end user evaluators.
- Not have to put in place any financial barriers or fees for small disadvantaged business other eRFP systems require.
- Implement the eRFP system which has a modest one time license fee that most Purchasing Depts. budget can afford.
- Include the option to either have Sysoft host our solicitations on their servers ,for a small annual fee, or have the college host it in house.
FCCJ recently went live in May/June 2007 Production with an eRFP solicitation for $8MM of HVAC delivery order contracting.
The eRFP evaluation system had a multi campus cross functional evaluation committee that found the online process more efficient and easier to use than our previous paper based evaluation process.
FCCJ’s intent is to begin to use the eRFP system for all future college RFQ and RFP’s.
The college intent in the next 6 months is to next modify our procedures to begin to allow proposers to submit online their proposals/qualifications to the eRFP system.
Once implemented the college and evaluation committee at public opening would be able to efficiently /instantly side by side compare each proposers response digitally.
Florida Community College at Jacksonville Purchasing Department highly recommends the use of Sysoft eRFP system as a process improvement opportunity to a time consuming paper based process to develop/manage the solicitation and evaluation of RFP’s.
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