Systemwide procurement won the golden award for design in 2024. Learn more about their contributions based on the following excerpt based on their UC Tech 2024 Awards Program nomination, and join us on Thursday, June 26 at UC Riverside, to learn about the 2025 award winners. Below, please find a description of their project, based on their 2024 UC Tech Award Design Awards application.
Project Summary
Systemwide Procurement partnered with UCOP IT and Marketing teams, plus the 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. We now have one home for UC Procurement.
Project Description
Systemwide Procurement was established as a cross-campus collective that leverages the power of UC’s collective spend in contract negotiations. When we procure as one UC Procurement organization, instead of 10 campuses, 5 med centers, and 3 labs, we support UC’s mission by generating greater value and efficiency for the university.
For the past decade, five separate websites supported the work of Systemwide Procurement. Five independently branded sites do not align with the “one UC” image. This 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 five different systems into one, intuitive website with upgraded functionality to end users.
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.
New UC Procurement Portal – https://procurement.ucop.edu/
The Steps to Success
Before any development work could begin, we completed an intuitive reorganization and optimization of ten years of content and one-off website development. Each of these five websites hosted UC mission-critical content, for example, 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 much easier to complete our new site in a silo, opting for speed over collaboration, but that doesn’t align with UC’s mission or the mission of UC Procurement. As we completed the content audit, we partnered with the SharePoint team, hosting team, web accessibility team, and brand team to align on deliverables, focusing on the optimal use of internal resources to avoid future costs. We also worked closely with the SharePoint and hosting teams to ensure a seamless decommissioning process for the existing five sites.
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.
Scope Overview
With a clear scope, we worked with the vendor from March through December 2023 to define, design, and develop the UC Procurement Portal. During the portal development phase, the Systemwide Procurement Communications Working Group, a cross-campus collaboration team, designed the decommissioning process and the URL redirect plans. We soft-launched in December, over the winter break to minimize disruptions to the campuses.
The UC Procurement Portal officially launched in January 2024. At the same time we decommissioned our first site – UCOP SharePoint on-premises. Decommissioning and URL redirects will continue until the first quarter of 2025. The response to the new UC Procurement Portal has been overwhelmingly positive. Metrics for success are up across the board.
Results and Impact
Analytics reporting capabilities for the five existing websites were either minimal or non-existent. The UC Procurement Portal utilizes Google Analytics and Tag Manager, which ties into our email analytics, allowing us to track users throughout their journey.
Timeline
Content audits and leadership buy-in presentations started in early 2022. Vendor selection took place at the end of 2022 and the project team was established in early 2023. The soft launch happened in December 2023 and the final launch took place in January 2024. Decommissioning of existing sites will be completed in 2024 and URL redirects will function into 2025.
Project Team
UC Systemwide Travel
- Debra Stevens, Travel Project Manager, UC Systemwide Travel
UC Systemwide Procurement
- Nick Bowerman, Technology Program Manager
- Monique Carter, Administrative Officer
- Renea Davis-Leathers, Specialist, Communications & Training
- Kevin Pham, Business Systems Analyst
- Karen Rhee, Director, Procurement Systems
Contact
Technology and communication specialist
University of California Office of the President
Cover photo caption: Nick Bowerman and Renea Davis-Leathers with CIO Van Williams winning the award at the 2024 UC Tech Awards ceremony at UC Davis