‘Excited and Torn’: L.A.’s Innovation Committee OKs Procurement System Upgrade

Earlier this month, the city of Los Angeles’ Budget, Finance and Innovation Committee voted in favor of a plan to supplement the city’s contracting and procurement systems with new tools and capabilities.

There are two parts to this $700,000 plan. The first is a centralized “end-to-end procurement system” pilot meant to digitize and streamline the city’s “cumbersome, disjointed and confusing” process, staff said in their report to the committee. That effort comes with a $400,000 price tag.

“The system is anticipated to be a tool for firms to submit and track the progress of their invoices and their payments as well as allowing for city staff to assign, review, reject inaccurate invoices, and approve complete invoices for payment,” Chief Procurement Officer Shannon Hoppes told the committee.

The Board of Public Works and Information Technology Agency will work with the city’s chief administrative officer to create the modules that make up the system, which is expected to be operational within a year of funding approval. The new additions are not intended to replace the city’s Financial Management System, Hoppes explained.

One of the selling points of the pilot will be access to data-driven insights — especially related to late payments to contractors, which have been an ongoing issue for the city, Hoppes said.

“Why these are both innovative solutions is that they propose a solution that will digitize existing paper-based processes and allows for transparency for subsequent process improvements to continue after they have been put in place,” Hoppes said.

The second part of the effort is a $300,000 bid creation and management tool that will provide contracting staff with “resources and guidance, including templates, a bid wizard to guide city staff on the development of the relevant bidding documents, relevant contract compliance documentation and the appropriate next steps.” Hoppes called it “e-bidding on a citywide scale.”

Not everyone on the committee was enthused by the proposals. Chairman Bob Blumenfield said he was “lukewarm” about using money from the Innovation Fund to implement changes that would have been “innovative 30 years ago.”

“I can't believe in this day and age that that's innovative. That’s a very frightening thought to me,” he said.

Councilmember Monica Rodriguez also voiced reservations about the pilot projects, urging a deeper look at the strategic needs of contracting and procurement across all city departments.

“But let's be honest about whether or not that's an innovation. It's basically building out a new era of a legacy system,” she said.

Hoppes agreed that the pilots don’t represent the sort of cutting-edge innovation that the committee would like to fund, but noted that years of underinvestment in the city’s procurement and contracting space had put it decades behind more modern systems.

“We need to get to the 21st century,” Hoppes said.