F.H. Black & Company

The Client

A Canadian territorial government department, responsible for overseeing and reporting on all public funds paid to private enterprise for the contracting of services and the procurement of goods.

The Problem

The department has a requirement to table annual reports of all procurement activity in the legislative assembly. Their systems and procedures for producing those reports were seen as problematic, and people were beginning to question the accuracy of the annual reports.

The data was collected across a large geographic area by individual reporting officers. They would hand-print on paper forms and mail them to the Department headquarters for processing. If errors were discovered, it was a long and difficult process to inform the reporting officer of the problem, and then receive corrected information back from them.

Once the information was collected, it was entered into an unsecured Microsoft Access database on an employees' computer. This database would then be queried for information about the data as the Department's staff transcribed the information by hand into Microsoft Word files which became the final annual reports.

This process led to:

1. significant delays in producing the report
2. constant human intervention and interpretation of the data, allowing for increased errors
   
3. inconsistencies in the formatting of the reports
4. ultimately, a lack of faith in the numbers as presented.

The Department decided that a more efficient process with a higher level of data integrity was required.

The Solution

F.H. Black & Company performed a comprehensive business process review of the the Department's procurement procedures and developed a set of recommendations on ways to improve the process:

1. All procurement data to be submitted via a single web application available in all geographic locations
2. A Submit/Review workflow to be implemented allowing the acceptance or rejection of contract information
3. Ad-hoc management reports to allow day-to-day management of procurement activities
4. Automated export processes to generate the numbers required by the annual reports
5. Industry-standard reporting solution (CaseWare Working Papers) to be used to create consistent, templated reports

The Department accepted these recommendations and FHB immediately implemented them via a website in ASP.NET 2.0, backed by a MySQL 5.0 database. The website implements a security model that includes procurement reporters, reviewers, and administrators who collaborate on workflows to process incoming procurement data, review it, correct it when required, and then finalize it for inclusion in the final report.

Administrators can make use of ad-hoc reporting tools to quickly review data and sort and filter it to address problems or concerns throughout the year, rather than only at year-end.

The web application contains the logic required to generate all the information in the final reports - administrators perform a simple export routine and import the numbers into a CaseWare Working Papers file. That CaseWare file contains the template for the entire report. Department staff can enter management discussion and analysis text in special areas reserved for that purpose, without allowing them to create inconsistencies or other problems with the report.

The Results

The Department has reported rising levels of procurement activity for the past 3 years with the new system in place. Management attributes those increased levels at least partially to more accurate capture and reporting of information.

In the 2007-2008 fiscal year, the web application tracked and reported on more than $120 million of procurement activity.

In addition, the newly automated and templated reports are being produced more quickly and with less effort than before. Staff time which used to be required in producing the report can now be spent on other tasks, such as reviewing procurement data and assuring a higher level of accuracy and completeness in the data.

The web application continues to grow and evolve in ways to better serve the Department. Recent additions to the application include a public portal for citizens to see a subset of the available information, and updates to the ad-hoc reporting tools to allow even greater control by administrators.