Seattle Modernizes Procurement System

Seattle City Light

Seattle City Light (SCL) is the public utility providing electrical power to Seattle, Washington, and parts of its metropolitan area. Seattle City Light is the 10th largest public utility in the United States and the US’s first municipal utility to own and operate a hydroelectric facility. SCL is a department of the City of Seattle and is governed by the Transportation and Utilities committee of the Seattle City Council.

Background

The Contracts & Procurement (C&P) unit is responsible for acquiring contract services and goods for Seattle City Light. The staff in the unit manage a variety of business processes and documents to ensure successful procurement of critical resources in a timely, efficient, and cost-effective manner. Most of these processes were completely manual with little consistency in methodology, and contract documentation was only available and later stored in hard-copy form. This lack of automated, streamlined business processes can make day-to-day work time-consuming and unnecessarily difficult for C&P staff and SCL business unit representatives. Additionally, utilizing only paper contracts and documents requires significant time in processing, filing, and searching, resulting in missing or lost documentation.

Modernizing the Intake Process

There was an opportunity to provide the C&P unit a more effective strategy to complete their work through improved consistency and reliability in documentation. This is upon completing the Enterprise Content Management ECM Procurement Solution project. Successful completion would result in the following enhancements for the business unit:

• Structured document repository with efficient file retrieval
• Electronic procurement intake form
• Streamlined and automated business processes

This project’s high-level goals were to mitigate the risks and problems that arise from using hard-copy forms, improve consistency in processes and quality of deliverables, and improve access and traceability of data and documents for staff and internal customers.