Portal: A Doorway to Worldwide DOD Procurement
The Standard Procurement System (SPS), operated by the Joint Program Management Office (JPMO) of the Department of Defense (DOD), is an automated information system designed to support procurement functions, from requirements definition through to contract completion and closeout, for all Defense procurement organizations. It was designed to replace dozens of legacy systems, plus numerous manual procurement processes across the various DOD organizations.
To date, SPS has been deployed to more than 23,000 users at 360+ sites using Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise and PowerBuilder products. When fully implemented, more than 43,000 users at more than 900 Defense procurement sites will be using this system.
One-Stop Shopping for DOD
“Our goal in creating SPS was to replace approximately 80 different, non-standard procurement systems with one standard system, provide a technical solutions to persistent financial management problems and establish a foundation for the electronic interchange of procurement-related information across the DOD enterprise,” explains Gino Magnifico, Deputy Program Manager for SPS.
Given SPS’ geographic scope and large user base, however, it has been a challenge to keep users and local procurement specialists fully informed about the system as it relates specifically to their jobs. It has also been difficult for SPS’ program managers to gather the information they need to maximize the effectiveness and the ROI of the system.
To address these challenges, the senior SPS Program Manager decided to create a Center of Excellence—an online resource where end-users, procurement specialists and senior management alike could go to retrieve the most up-to-date information on the system, training opportunities, system upgrade schedules and usage patterns and trends. The solution chosen to create this Center for Excellence was Sybase Enterprise Portal.
Single Role-Based Doorway to SPS
“As you can imagine,” says Magnifico, “trying to standardize a business process across all of the DOD services is a large change-management challenge, because each service component has unique military missions and unique business challenges. The Sybase Enterprise Portal is enabling us to accomplish this task by providing a single-role-based doorway into the SPS, both for end-users and our senior leaders. It is also the doorway to the Center of Excellence so that functional users across the system can get the information they need to set up a contract, obtain current information on the SPS program, get software fixes and information on forthcoming system upgrades and online training to improve their SPS skills.
“Our goal for the portals is one-stop shopping for SPS,” Magnifico explains. “When you log onto the portal, you can access any element of SPS from basic program information such as deployment schedules to detailed ‘how-to’ advice such as ‘tips and tricks’ without having to move from one login to another.”
Direct Reach To the Desktop
Previously, whenever the JPMO needed to communicate programmatic information about SPS to the field, it would have to be disseminated via hard copy, e-mail, face-to-face visits to various sites or user conferences. “Invariably, when we visited sites to talk about the program and its capabilities,” says Magnifico, “individual users would come up to us and ask why they hadn’t heard about any of this before, even when much of the information had been out there for months. The portal gives us day-in, day-out reach down to the individuals users’ desktops and that’s a great advantage, which also provides us a real return on investment.”
“We can hold a conference and maybe several hundred people will attend, says Magnifico, “but with the portal we will be able to communicate with all 23,000 users at once. That’s a big difference.”
About Sybase Enterprise Portal 5.0
Sybase’s new Enterprise Portal 5.0 makes portal projects viable by reducing the time and cost of deployments. Sybase’s integrated solution addresses the full portal lifecycle including development, maintenance, and deployment.
Developing and Deploying a Portal
Portal Studio is a completely web-based tool for portal development and deployment. A point-and-click interface lets you quickly and intuitively develop, maintain and deploy portals and portlets. You can:
Build portlets without programming: Construct portlets from a variety of sources—JSPs, XML feeds, HTML elements, databases, or web services—without writing any code. A one-click capture feature automatically parses a web page into selectable components and lets you grab as much of the page surrounding your selection as desired.
Convert existing applications into portlets: Wrap existing web applications such as standard JSPs into portlets, eliminating the need to rewrite applications using proprietary development kits or portal APIs.
Use advanced layout and organizational tools: Organize portlets into pages and package them for deployment to end users. Create and manage a hierarchical catalog of all portlets that is published for users.
Manage workflow and versioning: Manage portlets (and other objects such as catalogs) through their entire life cycle with built in workflow and support for a hierarchical approval chain. Track changes to portlets throughout development and maintenance.
Search and filter: Efficiently search hundreds or even thousands of portlets to find and view the ones you want.
One Click Hot Deployment: Deploy complete portal or individual portlets with a point and click interface without having to manually copy files or restart the portal