The Challenge
Like many tribes, the Forest County Potawatomi's procurement process was paper-based, slow and inefficient. Requests, approvals and POs could take hours, days or weeks, depending on each department's process, the availability of necessary people to review and approve requests, getting approved requests back to accounting, etc.
However, prior to going paperless with One Prospect's Tribal eProcurement system, there were a number of hurdles to clear, including getting all departments and employees on the same network and email client as well as ensuring everyone had reliable internet connectivity.
The One Prospect Solution
One Prospect's Technical Services team first completed an infrastructure assessment which was utilized to develop the plan and timeline necessary to get all tribal employees connected and email compatible. At the same time, our Applications Developers mapped departmental and tribal workflows. Who initiated purchase requests and how? What information did requests need to include? Who needed to approve what? What standards and common practices did—or would—all departments share? Were there redundancies that could be eliminated?
Tribal eProcurement was installed on the tribe's network and, after testing and training with accounting, rolled out department by department. The benefits were noticed immediately by administrators who could now review and approve requests on any internet-connected device, by purchasing who could fulfill many requests almost immediately, by employees who knew how every expenditure impacted their budgets and, of course, by accounting, which could see how much the tribe was saving in labor, paper and inefficient spending.
