The purchase procedure of government institutions

A system that suggests personalized contracts

Among the different mechanisms of purchase that government institutions in Chile follow, bids are the most rejected by civil servants due to the bureaucracy that generates. In that context, this project sought to adapt the main procedure of buying to the various institution’s realities by fostering collaboration during the creation of the bid and making more accessible searching those bids to local providers.

The system created during a year consisted of a platform that suggests a bid structure depending on the institution size and composition. The contract that allows providers to submit their offers now is created through a step-by-step system that gathers the different area’s requirements and automatizes the evaluation of proposals once the purchase opportunity has finished.

After the beta release, the system built was introduced nationally by the director of the national institute of public purchases and a team of coaches that guided the widespread adoption.

Understanding the purchase experiences of different institutions

The project started by mapping journeys to distinguish the institution structures differences and the boundaries during the whole process. After many collaborative sessions with teams representative of government areas, the user experience team detected a pattern of pains in four main stages.

Once the proposition stage began, many ideas were generated and clustered through a ”how might we” technique to understand expectations and desires, and the legal contracts were analyzed to detect bast and worst practices under the legal definition of the National Public Purchases law.

Testing concepts and functionalities

After defining a prioritization of ideas with the legal and the development team, test sessions were arranged with key members of government organizations to present the modifications that we were boosting. Through usability tests, the team checked the concepts and the hypothesis associated with the designs. Finally, the proposals that did not achieve our goals were dismissed, and the successful ones were adjusted to meet the desired scenario.

On the other hand, the implementations that involved legal areas and director interests were discussed by showing the benefits through storyboards and real cases of municipalities and other vital institutions.