With NTTA, Team Member Pat Parrish was hired to create a best in class contract compliance tracking and monitoring system, a comprehensive platform system that included a single point of information necessary to obtain required procurement information from the financial system of record, design an automated mode of transferring all required data identified by the business owner from a system of record to a third party software application with minimum risk involved .Establish data integrity performance standards; Incorporate best practice recommendations presented by Executive Staff of NTTA Business Diversity Partner to enhance NTTA’s Business Diversity Program; Minimize data enhancements needed for upcoming Availability and Disparity Study and to migrate from paper to a paperless real time reporting system.
The current process was labor intensive and prong to risk due to the manual entries into compliance system used to generate metrics, required information to generate metrics was not maintained in the NTTA Master Vendor file or Financial System of Record. The master vendor file used to generate official financial and state and federal mandated reports was required to be manually validated and updated before metrics could be generated and published to the public and stakeholders.
We evaluated the current system, policy and procedures, state and federal procurement laws, Board policy and internal processes supporting existing procurement spend analysis. We build a system that enable NTTA to generate business metrics for presentation to NTTA Executive Leadership, NTTA Board Members and elected officials. Once the system was implemented, performance metrics were available in real time, was web-based, allowed the required data fields needed to generate contractor commitment to business diversity, monitor their commitment and provide reports that enabled the Business Diversity Leadership to generate ad hoc reports associated with Business Diversity throughout the North Texas Region. We conducted a Gap analysis that resulted in a need to modify vendor/contract modules in the Financial System of Record and an update to the interface that allowed the Financial System of Record to communicate with the third-party compliance tracking and reporting application. Worked closely with a wide variety of constituents to assess programmatic needs that support diversity issues throughout the organizations. We conducted a risk assessment and determined that reports manually may result in inaccurate business diversity and metrics published to the stakeholders and the public thus jeopardizing public trust. Our assessment also disclosed an inflated or higher risk of reporting on the accomplishments of NTTA Business Diversity Program.
The project reduced the level of manual effort and time needed to create various metrics, reports, including the annual diversity spend attainment reports provided to the board, elected officials and the public on NTTA’s procurement practices and its impact on economic development in the small business and diversity communities.
Over a two-year period, we worked with managers, administrators, directors, assistant directors, leadership team, internal audit, legal two hundred 240 prime contractors and subcontractors and outside consultants appointed by the Board to ensure transparency and governance.,. This team was responsible for promoting; monitoring and evaluating quality-related activities by promoting involvement and participation from all levels of the client and vendor organization.
System resulted in contract compliance across the entire organization, it introduced automation where there were no processes. Our process implemented were a collection of interrelated tasks in response to a stimulus or input. Each process designed and implemented consisted of a stimuli/input, tasks, roles, deliverable and completion criteria. System designed and implemented was an automated contract compliance tracking and reporting systems, resulting in a timely and accurate reporting for over $425M spend and preventing duplicate and erroneous payment to vendors.