buyers: Upcoming Changes to the Purchasing Portal

[Christy Dotson]

The UO Purchasing Portal celebrated its one year anniversary at the beginning of April.  With your help, PCS has continued to streamline and improve the Purchasing Portal and our internal processes to increase transparency and decrease the turn-around time for your contracts and other purchases.  Many of these changes have happened behind the scenes after conversations with campus colleagues like you, while others, like the additional matter type for pre-approving PCard purchases, have been more visible.

We want to let you know about an upcoming change that we anticipate implementing in early May. There has been some confusion about when and if a contract should or can be expedited.  Expedites are reserved for special circumstances only - emergencies that were unforeseeable.  Because it is for only extremely unusual emergencies we have decided to make a change in how expedited matters are handled.

PCS will be remove the "Expedited" button from the intake form on the UO Purchasing Portal.  In the future, if you have an emergency situation that needs an expedited timeline, we encourage you to contact your department's designated contracts technician or contracts officer to let them know.  If you don't know who is assigned to your department, you can find a list of contract technicians and officers assigned to each department here<http://pcs.uoregon.edu/sites/pcs1.uoregon.edu/files/departmentassignments_final_topost.xlsx>.

We understand that individuals who are responsible for completing and submitting the paperwork to PCS are often not the ones who set the timeline of when a contract is submitted and needed.  We are mindful of these circumstances that may be out of your control.  We plan to be as responsive to your emergency needs as much as if not more than before.  Removing this expedite button, however, will not only allow PCS to turn its attention to contracts in the order in which they are submitted, but also foster more one-on-one conversations about your department's needs. We want to continue our conversations with each department so we can integrate our team into earlier steps of your planning processes.  This will help us more effectively partner with you to meet your needs on the schedule you want.

As a reminder, fiscal year-end deadlines for processing of various matters are posted on the UO PCS website<http://pcs.uoregon.edu/sites/pcs1.uoregon.edu/files/fy17deadlines_final_topost.pdf>.  We will continue to process matters submitted after the deadlines, but we cannot guarantee that they will all be completed prior to June 30.

We appreciate your help and support as we move forward to continue to improve our service to you and the rest of campus.

Thank you,

The Purchasing & Contracting Services team


[cid:4B9B6C3F-95CC-44A6-9B03-D592F3AE51E2]

Purchasing and Contracting Services
1600 Millrace Drive, Suite 306 | Eugene, OR 97403-1995
(541) 346-2419 | pcs.uoregon.edu<https://pcs.uoregon.edu/>

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