Santa Monica, California, revamps procurement ‘bottleneck’
Courtesy image via Glass
By
Chris Teale
The city has turned to Glass to run a new e-commerce platform that allows staff to make quicker purchases, keep track of contracts and maintain more transparency into the process.
Santa, Monica, California, last week unveiled its new e-commerce platform for public sector procurement, an effort it said marks the “next generation” of government purchasing.
The platform, powered by government purchasing software company Glass and its G-Commerce software built for the public sector, allows Santa Monica’s employees in more than 10 agencies to buy various supplies with their government credit cards in a more streamlined fashion. Glass estimates the system is set up to support around $3 million in annual transactions of around 5 million products and services offered by city vendors.
The city had initially transitioned to the system in May 2024, with this launch marking a further rollout of the platform throughout Santa Monica’s government. In a statement released by Glass, Santa Monica’s procurement leadership said G-Commerce has “enriched our internal purchasing experience, enhanced our spend visibility and metrics, and positioned ourselves higher as an industry leader.”
The platform allows staff to buy all manner of goods, including IT equipment, office supplies, chemical supplies, construction safety equipment and much more. Any purchases that exceed a predefined threshold are automatically routed to managers for further analysis and approval or rejection within the same platform.
And the software allows the entire purchasing process to be tracked in one place. That’s a big change from before, when the city used what Glass Chief Operating Officer Gerardo Mateo called “black box software” that “didn't allow them to see much of this data or make decisions based on this. They needed to wait at the end of the year to get the report in their platform.” Now, Santa Monica has dashboards that regularly update to give them greater transparency into how money is being spent, and the city receives monthly reports.
“Everything happens in the same flow, in one single place, instead of having multiple email chains with people to get something approved,” Mateo said. “They can track that in real time, they can see the contents of the cart, they can see what is being requested and why. Once the transaction is completed and is approved, then the record lives in one single place forever.”
The platform can be updated to reflect various state and local procurement rules, too. California law incentivizes local government agencies to buy more recycled products and materials, and G-Commerce allows Santa Monica to keep track of its green purchases and adjust where possible. Glass can also update the platform to, for example, make sure that any local requirements around using small, local, minority-owned businesses are reflected in available products.
Finding vendors is easier too, due to G-Commerce’s vendor verification tool.
“One of the biggest challenges that agencies have is that sometimes they work with cooperative agreements and contracts,” Mateo said. “They have a network of vendors, but they don't know who these vendors are. They don't know their pricing. They don't know if the pricing that is contracted is actually competitive. “What we do is we put everyone in one single search bar: the vendors that are contracted, the vendors that are open market, and then the government agencies, they have visibility.”
Glass said it already supports 121 government agencies in modernizing and streamlining their procurement processes, and has facilitated over $6.5 million in public sector purchasing. The company has also received a contract with the General Services Administration to offer modernized payments and ordering for the federal government.
And it comes as governments across the nation are looking to modernize their procurement processes. That modernization has included splashy efforts to revamp the request for proposals process to better reflect technology’s evolution, but it has also involved turning to software to help streamline the process of signing contracts and acquiring services.
In the past, procurement has been a “bottleneck” for government agencies, Mateo said, as they have different forms and databases to manage in different places while executing on a contract or a purchase order. Santa Monica’s procurement process can move as fast as private sector companies while providing cheaper service, Mateo said, with most orders fulfilled within the next three business days.
“We're running all the logistics with the vendors to make sure that the fulfillment is also part of the experience,” he said. “That's our North Star. Since we're all used to Amazon, getting things the next day, that takes a lot of effort and logistics. Doing that with Santa Monica has allowed us to see so many opportunities in connecting local demand with local supply.”