Background: After dealing with an application program that was cumbersome and unintuitive, the Department of Facilities Planning and Construction at the University of Alaska Anchorage began looking for a solution that would make their process more efficient and easy to use for contractors.
Solution: The team now leverages Bid Express for all bids over $200,000 as well as the occasional RFQ/RFP. With intuitive functionality, time-saving templates, and greater supplier reach, Bid Express addresses the challenges the University was facing.
Results:
Improved ease of use | Increased competition and audience of sellers | Subscription cost savings
“It was more cost effective, more streamlined, easier to use and your help desk has been very helpful to us and our contractors who have requested assistance.” – Kent Ariola, Procurement Officer
To learn more about the University’s use of Bid Express, we spoke with Kent Ariola, the Procurement Officer for the Department of Facilities Planning and Construction.
What led the University to consider other application programs?
The University of Alaska Anchorage has been at the forefront of e-offering for some time and was already leveraging an application program to accept and track offers electronically. The problem? It wasn’t a very user-friendly program, so the team was missing out on all the time-saving potential that e-bidding can offer.
“Sometimes I had a hard time loading documents, sometimes it just timed out, and because it wasn’t user-friendly, it took a lot of clicks just to load certain documents.”
Poor ease of use is one thing, but the program that preceded Bid Express also cost more than some alternatives on the market, which was a bridge too far for the University. They began researching other solutions and, at the recommendation of the Fairbanks campus, began looking at Bid Express.
Implementation of Bid Express
After the University made the decision to use Bid Express for their applications, the next step was to model the University’s most common application types and get everyone up to speed on how to use the software. Kent noted that the responsiveness and effectiveness of Bid Express’ help desk is a huge differentiator for the platform, and working with the implementation team was no different.
“I thought the implementation process was great. Your team was very helpful in this process and if we needed any new templates, you were very responsive. I think it went very well.”
After a few demos and Q&A sessions, Kent and his team were ready to start using Bid Express and see how it compared to (and hopefully improved upon) their previous bidding platform.
Bid Express Use Cases
The University uses Bid Express for any major renovation and construction project over $200,000, mostly unit price contracts where contractors submit a blind bid and compete to have the lowest bid. Lately, the team has also published more RFPs and RFQs on the platform. “It’s a lot easier than emailing it and it’s easier to track,” Kent said.
As the University continues to send out Requests for Low Bids and RFPs/RFQs, Kent said they will begin to take advantage of more of the RFP-specific features that have been added to Bid Express over the years, such as a scoring weighted and the ability to invite specific vendors to participate in any given proposal.
