The UC Procurement Portal has not only been life-changing for users across the UC system looking for systemwide contracts, policy guidance, and procurement resources and suppliers interested in doing business with UC, but also recently gained top recognition in the DESIGN Award category at the UC Tech Awards held October 29 at UC Davis as part of the 2024 UC Tech Conference.
Systemwide Procurement partnered with UCOP IT and Branding teams, and UC campus locations to create one unified web presence for UC Procurement: https://procurement.ucop.edu/ The content from five existing sites was reorganized and optimized in a responsive, branded design, meeting all web accessibility standards, with detailed analytics, and maintaining all functionality of the existing sites. The UC community now has one home for UC Procurement.
Portal Project Background
The UC Procurement Portal is a public-facing web application designed to be a single source of truth for systemwide procurement policies, procedures, training, news, events, and more. We consolidated and streamlined the procurement content from five existing websites: UCOP.edu/procurement, CalUsource.net, UCOP SharePoint, the Benefit Bank Knowledge Base, and the UC Partnership Program (UCPP) website.
For the past decade, these five separate websites supported the work of Systemwide Procurement. Systemwide Procurement, based at the Office of the President, was established as a cross-campus collective that leverages the power of UC’s collective spend in contract negotiations, policy setting, and resource development. When we procure as one UC Procurement organization, instead of 10 campuses, six medical centers, and three national laboratories, we support UC’s mission by generating greater value and efficiency for the University. Five independently branded sites do not align with the “One UC” image. This has caused considerable confusion for UC researchers, faculty, and staff, as well as our suppliers and community organizations. The UC Procurement Portal project consolidated and updated the content from these five different systems into one intuitive website with upgraded functionality to end users.
Portal Project Process
Before development work began, we completed an intuitive reorganization and optimization of ten years of content and one-off website development. Each of these five sites hosted UC mission-critical content, like the UC Terms & Conditions. For a year, great care was taken to analyze and enhance the entire content library. Using the limited analytics available, we prioritized content based on historical use.
It would have been easier to opt for speed over collaboration, but that doesn’t align with the mission of UC or UC Procurement. As we completed the content audit, we partnered with the UCOP SharePoint team, the UCOP IT and web accessibility teams, and the UCOP Communications brand team to align on deliverables, focusing on the optimal use of internal resources to avoid future costs.
Portal Project Timeline
With the content ready, brand standards defined, and the technical and hosting requirements set, we engaged with our vendor to define the scope of work. With a clear scope, we worked with the vendor over nine months to define, design, and develop the new Portal. We soft-launched the UC Procurement Portal in December 2023 — over winter break to minimize disruptions to the campuses — with the official launch in January 2024. Since then, we've worked with the UC IT teams and a cross-campus Communications collaboration team to ensure a seamless decommissioning process for the former five sites, which will continue through the first quarter of 2025.
Results and Impact
The response to the new UC Procurement Portal has been overwhelmingly positive, and metrics for success are up exponentially. Within the first three months, the UC Procurement Portal had more page views than our previous five sites had in the past year…combined. Our previous sites analytics capabilities were either minimal or non-existent, but now we can track users through their journey to help us customize and prioritize content and continue to refine the resources that UC staff need to do their work and help our supplier partners deliver greater value to UC.