Procurement Excellence Award

We are pleased to celebrate Ben Lizak, Associate Chief Procurement Officer, who recently received a Procurement Excellence Award from EUNA. EUNA provides the cloud solution supporting the KU eBid system.

According to the EUNA website, the Euna Procurement Awards "recognize public procurement teams and individuals who champion excellence, innovation, leadership and social responsibility."

Ben is overseeing a high-visibility RFP in ION WAVE for an Enterprise Service Management (ESM) software tool for the University of Kansas. KU currently has multiple ESM tools across campus, which is both costly and administratively burdensome. KU’s goal is to identify, and consolidate to, a single best-in-class ESM solution. This is challenging given the large number of stakeholders involved from various units across campus with dozens of different use cases.

In the RFP, KU had 400+ unique business requirements, or attributes, in ION WAVE to account for the variety of needs spanning so many different units. When KU went out to bid, it received a whopping 13 bid responses. That means, there were roughly 5,000 points of comparison!

Ben leveraged functionality in ION WAVE so that the evaluation team could efficiently sift through what was a daunting amount of data that needed to be reviewed. More specifically, using the bid export feature in ION WAVE, Ben was able to generate a side-by-side comparison of all bid responses in Excel. From there, the evaluation team was able to color code (red/yellow/green) based on platform functionality. By building consensus with comparative data -- organized in a way that was straightforward and “easy on the eyes” -- the evaluation team was able to quickly identify the serious contenders to advance to the demonstration round and then hone in on finalists.

Congratulations to Ben on this distinguished award! We are so proud to have him on our team!