VIRGINIA - EProcurement, short for Enterprise Procurement, is a software program within the Enterprise Business System that automates and standardizes contract writing throughout the agency. It was developed to replace DLA’s legacy contracting systems, which range from manual-entry paper systems to fully automated systems used at the agency’s various field activities.
“This will bring DLA, which has thousands of users [and] multiple buying activities spread throughout the world, onto the same contract writing and contract administration system,” said Air Force Col. Mike Claffey, the procurement process owner in DLA Acquisition. “Really, we would be the first in the entire Department of Defense to do that.”
DLA began developing EProcurement several years ago as a way to streamlining the more than 10,000 contract awards and modifications the agency processes each day, said Sabrina Holloway, the EProcurement project lead in DLA Information Operations. The project originally started in 2002, she said. The 2005 Base Realignment and Closure recommendation that gave DLA responsibility for procuring all depot-level reparable items added new requirements to the project. Depot-level reparables are parts that can be repaired and reused throughout their usable life, like transmissions and vehicle engines.
The final EProcurement solution includes capabilities not only for simplified acquisitions, long-term contracts, service contracts and performance-based logistics contracts, but will also include capabilities for DLR procurement, Holloway said.
The incremental release of EProcurement, which began in November and will continue with Release 1.1 in February and Release 1.2 next summer, wasn’t the original plan for the project, but was borne out of necessity when some technical issues delayed an enterprise-wide release, Claffey said. DLA senior leaders decided they wanted to get the program started in 2010 as opposed to waiting for a large-scale release.
“It was becoming difficult to get all the functionality in that we need to get in one big bite, which was the original plan,” said Rob Gee, the EProcurement functional lead in DLA Acquisition Management. “Breaking it up into smaller increments has probably been a good move. It’s made things a lot more manageable.”
The first release of EProcurement is going to Strategic Materials and Document Services because they are smaller activities with fairly simple procurement systems, Gee said. In this way, DLA can start the program with a small number of users and gradually grow the system with the future releases, using feedback from the first users to improve the system along the way.
“It’s not going to be perfect; there’s going to be bumps along the way as we deploy this thing,” Gee said. “We’re there to work through it.”
EProcurement will most definitely bring changes to DLA Document Services, where all contracts were previously written manually in word-processing programs, said Steve Sherman, director of DLA Document Services. He said he expects the system to improve the efficiency and quality of his activity’s contracting practices. He noted that DLA Document Services implemented the Enterprise Business System in June 2009, and employees were putting in a lot of extra work to learn the new system and ensure all the contracting documents synched up for each transaction.
“We’re looking for both streamlining efficiencies, which I think is extremely important in today’s environment, and improvement in quality and consistency, because we’re using a program to ensure that our contract packages are properly built,” Sherman said.
Implementing EProcurement will bring challenges, as any new system does, Sherman said. Besides the expected functional issues, one of the most obvious will be the culture change. Employees will have to learn how to use the new system. To overcome this challenge, DLA Document Services has been conducting EProcurement training and putting a lot of emphasis on change management, he said.
“We’re looking forward to it,” he said. “We’re depending on it to streamline our process and improve quality and consistency, and we’re going to make it work.”
In addition to training employees, the DLA EProcurement Program Office has been testing the EProcurement system in preparation for the first releases, said Chuck McNelley, chief of contracting for DLA Document Services. He noted that DLA EProcurement Program Office personnel at Hybla Valley took current contracts from DLA Document Services and loaded them into the system to ensure everything worked smoothly.
A key component in preparing to release EProcurement has been workforce training, Claffey said.
“In this resource-constrained environment, we’re seeing a great team effort by all of DLA to step up and to tailor the training and make it the most meaningful and have the biggest and best impact to the users and posture them for success,” he said.
Some of the notable new capabilities are in the contract administration and records management areas, Gee said. EProcurement will also establish automated interfaces with various Defense Department and federal systems, Claffey said.
EProcurement was designed to work within the agency’s Enterprise Business System, the technology hub that makes DLA’s daily supply-management operations possible. EBS is the “backbone” that contains all the core financial, technical, procurement and item data, Gee explained. EProcurement will work as a subsystem of EBS and will be used by DLA’s buyers and contract administrators to process purchase requests and customer-direct requisitions, he said.
“They will use EProcurement to go out and do their job and solicit bids or quotes from vendors, create those solicitation documents, get the quotes back in, do the evaluations, make the contract award, and all the actions that need to be taken to do a purchase,” he said. “The data, of course, as we’re going along, is being fed back into EBS.”
Having an automated procurement system is something DLA has been working toward for a long time and is directly tied to stewardship initiatives outlined in the 2010 and 2011 Director’s Guidance, which are aimed at bringing EBS-enabled business process enhancements on line. It has taken a lot of work to get to this point, and while implementation may not be perfect, the system will ultimately bring many improvements to the agency’s procurement operations, Gee said.
“It’s going to be a big change for everybody. People are used to whatever systems they’ve been using for however many years, so there’s going to be a learning curve out there,” he said. “They’re just going to have to be aware of that and work with us along the way and eventually we’ll end up with a good system. It might not be tomorrow, but a few years down the road I think we’ll probably be glad that we did what we did.”