How Can I Sign Hawaii RFP

Document type sign rfp hawaii fast

hello everyone thank you for your patience this morning I want to thank you all for joining us here today my name is John Vetter and I work for the state procurement office as the Health and Human Services section chief let me thank you all for for attending today and this is my colleague operating the you can stand up there Christopher this is Christopher Raimondi he also works at the state procurement office we understand that the audience today includes new providers existing providers profit and nonprofit organizations as well as some procurement staff and community members the training today will provide on procurement and other relevant procedures as well as providing appropriate resources for continued learning and support the training presentations today start more general and become more detailed and specific as we progress through the three presentations I'm confident that there will be valuable information for existing providers and new providers and state procurement staff some of the stuff you're going to hear in my presentation if your existing providers may be kind of review but I guarantee you even for the existing providers there will be some information that will likely be new to you and appreciate I'm nervous by the way I'm nervous and I couldn't possibly memorize all of this so I'm going to be looking at my notes quite quite a lot so each presentation is approximately about an hour or less there'll be a lengthy breakout session at the end for questions and answers so what we're going to attempt to do is do the following state procurement office presentation Department of Human Services homeless programs presentation federal grants presentation and copies of the presentation will be available in the near future on the state procurement website the state procurement office acts as a strategic partner to to promote procurement lifecycle excellence program success and government accountability throughout this presentation I'm going to be referring to the state procurement office as the SPO just so you know so you know what I'm talking about but that's the state procurement office my mission at the Health and Human Services procurement division is simply to help those who help others we're dedicated to supporting the procurement professionals the providers and indirectly the service populations if there's one takeaway that I leave you with here today is that you can always call the procurement office you know procurement can be complicated but we're a you know a third party outside of the agency that you may be working with Department of Human Services or Department of Health we are kind of a resource for you I'll be covering the following topics Act one 62 partnering with the state state procurement website laws and rules Hawaii compliance Express Hawaii award notice data system hawaii state procurement system the procurement wizard procurement life cycle and the cooperative purchasing program I will try to provide you with key takeaways and why it's important it's gonna be kind of top-level but if you have further questions please after at the breakout session come talk to me if you need if you have any specific questions let me share with you why we're here today the senator kind of touched on it the legislature found that homeless outreach and homeless programs were lacking in rural areas of the state basically there's more infrastructure groups and providers on Oahu and while we could grow capacity here obviously we have serious problems here too the intent of the bill primarily is to increase capacity in rural areas of the state and he'll assist nonprofits in understanding procurement better there are three main goals that are equal equal goals that were set for this event we want to increase the knowledge base tools and resources available to nonprofit homeless outreach programs and homeless program providers excuse me second build capacity like I mentioned and third foster coordination between the service providers the state and county governments to increase effectiveness and successful outcomes the state procurement office is a shared resource serving all stakeholders like I mentioned we we support the state procurement professional service providers citizens and indirectly the service population we provide training tools templates there's stuff online human resources also like myself and Christopher too to help you improve your procurements have successful outcomes we want to encourage new providers and existing providers to work with the state you know state procurement office is here to help you we're not a scary organization we're friendly come talk to us so let's regardless of your role at the state the state procurement office official website is the ultimate resource for anyone engaged in partnering with the state for contract work we'll be referring to this website extensively it can be found at SP o Hawaii gov and you can access the laws procedures online procurement systems tools templates forms on-demand training you can find new business I'm gonna cover all of this while the state procurement office is the ultimate resource you could still call us this site is important because it is the gateway to doing business with the state that said let's jump right in the state laws and rules are the foundation of the procurement of procurement the references section of the SPO website is where you will find this foundational information the top red arrow is where you can find the Hawaii Revised statute referred to often as the hrs and the Hawaii administrative rules referred to as the har in addition the procurement will also help you understand the Hawaii of a revised statute the procurement wizard and administrative rules in a chronological manner if you click on the references section you will be taken to the following page which the state procurement the the hrs and the har are there these are the legal foundation that provide procurement Authority and establish the rules for all procurement any procurement you participate in are governed by these these statutes rules and procurement circulars like the private sector the state wants the best value for its purchases furthermore using taxpayer funds creates additional requirements and duties throughout the procurement process state agencies a state and county agencies must follow these standardized rules and procedures the state procurement office oversees two procurement statutes hrs 103d known as hawaii public procurement code for goods services and construction and hrs 103f for purchase of Health and Human Services that's primarily what you folks and and myself deal with that is the statute that we follow the state procurement offers oversees the procurement statutes the policies procedures tools training and is a service agency to the various departments and community providers being able to find and understand and comply with these laws is very important obviously from the very smallest contract to the largest we always remain ethical and compliant with all applicable laws so you want to do business with the state or you want to continue to do business with the state a great place to start is Hawaii compliance Express Hawaii compliance Express or hce is an electronic system that allows vendors doing business with the state or the county agencies to quickly and easily obtained online proof that they are compliant with applicable laws registration is required and there is a nominal $12 a year fee click on the Green Hawaii explain Hawaii compliance Express box and you'll be taken to this this site Hawaii compliance Express is a service basically so you can get a certificate of vendor compliance it's a single certificate that eliminates the need to obtain individual paper copies signed and stamped from the IRS the Department of Labor DCCA and the state tax office so you can still do it the old-fashioned way if you prefer but AC is a service that includes real-time monitoring of your status of compliance with each agency and will automatically notify you by email anytime your compliance status changes why is this important first it saves you time we can only put contracts out for folks that are companies that are compliant so state agencies must obtain proof of compliance prior to awarding a contract and also prior to final payment of the contract so if you want to do business you need this is a very helpful tool to sign up for and have a compliance a single form that does all of that for you the next thing we're gonna cover is so you're compliant now and you're looking for potential contracts with the state for homeless outreach services or homeless housing programs in rural areas of the state so go to the Hawaii Awards notice data system that's a mouthful for from the SPO website and just click on that big orange box so perhaps you're looking for potential Health and Human Services contracts that may directly or indirectly benefit homelessness in rural areas of the state this is not just homeless shelters as we all understand homelessness is a complex issue with many causes many unique service populations in therefore many potential solutions homeless service services encompass a broad range of vital services perhaps you're looking for potential contracts related to vocational training food service medical health service substance abuse treatment crisis intervention homeless children legal assistance or advocacy child development services you go to the Hawaii awards and notice data system I'm gonna call it hands because that's what we all call it here hands so go to hands and it provides a single you know user-friendly display for all notices of solicitation or potential contracts and there's no cost to login or to to browse all the opportunities here you'll be able to view all bidding opportunities and if you click on the bidding opportunity box as you can see when I created this presentation there was 200 there were 227 available contracts opportunities out there so there's 227 potential contracts where we were seeking providers when you click on the search you'll be taken to the following page the search page will display an up-to-date listing of notices and solicitations requests for information and other solicitation noticed used to assist in the procurement of goods services construction professional services and Health and Human Services throughout the entire state the procurement notices of solicitation including those on the hawk ham on the state of hawaii eprocurement system or hi-ee Pro are automatically placed into system there are a variety of search functions to find potential work in areas that you're interested in so you can enter simply enter keywords say vocational outreach homeless and open solicitations will automatically populate matching those keywords or you can search by a variety of other parameters so you could say you want to look at only opportunities on Maui for instance then everything will come up for Maui and you can filter and sort and slice and dice and look for what what services you provide and go out and and try to get that work in this example I type the keyword home and the category Health and Human Services as you can see there was one active solicitation or bidding opportunity when you click on the active solicitation you'll be taken to all the important information for the solicitation so if you wanted you find something you're interested in you go to this this area and it will show when you click on the active solicitation you'll see all of this types of information I'm not gonna go into every one of these but I do want to point out some of the key areas the solicitation description is what is the service that's needed the approximate funding is the potential annual funding for that particular contract project start date prod projected end date offered to due date so when does the proposal need to be submitted is very very critical this is very important because late offers by law need to be tossed so if you are if the solicitation ends at 4:00 p.m. January 15th and it comes in at 4:05 technically by the letter of the law it needs to be tossed so make sure you get your stuff in in advance of that date in case you have any technical issues wi-fi's down dog ate your homework whatever it is just make sure you make that on time also you'll be able to see where the services the islands you know is it a statewide contract is it just one one island and and so on also all the files you'll be able to see everything that's attached to the solicitation will include proposal proposal instructions specifications terms and conditions and any other potential documents that are necessary for you to build your proposal and then finally another important bit of information is the orientation meeting it's important because in almost all cases for Health and Human Services contracts solicitations for contracts there's an orientation meeting where providers can come and meet with the agency that's looking for providers discussed the solicitation try to you know understand parts that they don't understand ask questions is the you know open forum give-and-take so that you can better understand and hopefully get as many of those questions answered as you can so that when you're building your proposal while you can still ask questions during bill building your proposal this orientation meeting is a you know kind of a way to kick things off why is hands important well it's pretty self-explanatory I guess you know you need to know what the state is looking for in order to submit a timely and winning proposal it's very important that there's someone in your organization that is monitoring hands daily new requirements come up daily there's no rhyme or reason why one agency I mean I don't want to put it that way but all the different agencies that have different procurements their work at different times for different reasons and other contracts end and they need to place new ones in to backfill them so there's no particular time of year that's better than another you need to have somebody looking at hands keyword searching or whatever parameters that you think will cover your particular agency and somebody that's popping in and just taking a look at it okay nothing new today boom they're done that's just one thing that they have to do and because what you don't want to happen is somebody checking it weekly or every couple of weeks because if you if something if something has been released and it's got a 30 day turnaround for a proposal to be in and you're two weeks behind the power curve you know you're like oh my goodness like this is something we could do this is this is right right up our alley but you're already two weeks behind the curve and you miss the orientation and you're just gonna be haven't you struggling so I don't want to see that happen to anybody so please check that site there's another system that allows providers to see bidding opportunities and and the only difference with this one is with a significant difference is is that you can provide your proposals directly via online via this system and it's awarded through the system so it's the state procurement system eprocurement system is called high e pro or high hawaii ePro it is you can issue solicitations receive responses and you issue the awards the hand system that I previously discussed will show you these opportunities but you if it is a high pro so licit ation you would see it on hands but then you would need to go bid on it on high pro and you'll be able to tell when when you get familiar with the system's how that works so you can just go to the SPO website and register for Hawaii State a procurement system and you create a login hi-pro account and you can view similarly to the other site there's keyword searches you can look for what what your agency or your company nonprofit does best and you can search for potential work there once the the buyer or the state agency issues puts puts it in the system they put they'll upload all the documentation and you'll be able to see it also there's another great function with the high e pro system okay so is when your your company signs up there's what are called commodity codes and commodity codes basically just define different types of service if you're in if you do food preparation food service food delivery food storage and so on there's a bunch of Associated codes commodity codes that you could basically attach to your profile so that anytime any state agency uses hi-pro and is doing those commodity codes you'll be sent a notice that there's a solicitation out there for food transportation or whatever it is so it's important that you when you set up your high pro profile that you draw in as many of these codes identify as many of these codes that are things that your agency or your company is interested in providing so this is important website it's kind of self-explanatory like the other you need to know what the state needs and to provide a winning proposal so the procurement wizard is another great online resource okay the procurement this is the official guide to the executive branch and other jurisdictions on procurements for goods services and construction the primary sorry the primary the state's primary resource is obviously the Hawaii Revised statute and the Hawaii administrative rules as well as the procurement wizard the procurement wizard does primarily focus on 103 has more information on 103d type procurements which are you know not Health and Human Services type procurements but it does have a lot of information on 103f statute rules templates trainings all in a kind of chronological manner so you can click anywhere in the procurement lifecycle and find out information so if you're in the solicitation part you're in the award stage wherever these are kind of hot links that you can click on and it will take you to tools templates and it'll help you find which statute and where to find the statutes that kind of govern that particular procurement the state procurement office is this is continually being developed it's important because finding legal guidance tools tips it's it's a great site and the state procurement office is always updating this information we we attempt to keep it current and put in best business practices and the like in order to assist all the stakeholders so this procurement wizard graphic is kind of a natural segue to procurement lifecycle okay the procurement lifecycle refers to the full process of procurement from start to finish the various stages of procurement lifecycle will be comprised of relatively standard elements across all types of procurements so they're all going to have of these steps in one fashion or another so I'm gonna kind of top level explain this and again if you have a lot of experience with this I understand this may be a bit remedial for you but if you're new it won't be and and also if you've been doing it there may be some things that you can some information that you can glean that will help you have better outcomes the remainder of the presentation will provide the procurement lifecycle training or overview and the procurement planning phase encompasses several key processes in the procurement lifecycle from identifying and defining a need to determining the most appropriate acquisition method to address that need the pent planning phase frames the procurement approach and strategy key activities include conducting research analysis documenting results evaluating alternatives and deciding on the approach the state and the providers the community can and should be involved in this process there are a variety of 1 or 3 statutes that support this mutual planning so in this planning phase the 103f statue encourages this collaboration in several areas 103d procurement for like construction and stuff like that there are limp many more limitations on working together - with the state in this very early stage process like we don't want a construction company telling us what we need to buy to put it mildly like we you know we don't you know I think you can understand what what I mean by that you know Health and Human Services the types of stuff that we're doing are important it's important work and we need the folks that have boots on the ground to help us solve these problems and 103 statute allows for that okay the market research phase market research phase is arguably one of the most important phases of procurement lifecycle majority of major decisions are made about the procurement the key components necessary to manage the contract and award the contract are incorporated prior to solicitation there this is the stage where ideas and potential solutions for building capacity in rural areas can be presented and discussed rest requests for information are done in this phase requests for information are posted on hands that site I mentioned before so and providers should watch for these requests for information and provide responses the RFI helps agencies develop the solicitation including but not limited to the work specification the contract type the period of performance or just about any potential element of an upcoming solicitation so you look on hands it says there's a request for information so there's an agency that has some specific questions that they want to pulse the community on they need to see who's interested they need to see this that or the other they have some specific questions where they're requesting information from the provider community or you know just common citizens if they're watching this website they can comment to and and in that this is where information for molding the future contracts moulding the future specifications comes in so and let me how to best say this is you know we need to build capacity in rural areas so if in this request for information an agency goes out and says we need these questions ask who's interested in doing this homeless outreach program and this is what we and the problem we intend to solve or address in that RFI response back you can answer all those questions but what you also need to do is tell us how we can increase capacity you know tell us is it longer contracts is it this approach or that approach is it something programmatic let's say that you know would work better you know or you believe let's just say you believe that this this approach would be beneficial to increasing capacity here is it partnering with other agencies is it partnering with other nonprofits you are not bound by your suggestions neither is the State Department asking bound by your suggestion this is an open process it's a dialogue so in the RFI process if you have solutions that we can't think of if that we don't know about we need you to tell us how to better execute and meet the meet the needs of the citizens of Hawaii really a lot of you folks you know we are outside of the loop to some respect we're not we don't have boots on the ground I mean I know Harold and his folks are very involved and do the very best they can but you are a multitude so anyway the 103f statute requires that an RFI must be conducted whenever developing an RFP so at a minimum a purchasing agency and I'm quoting from the statue at a minimum a purchasing agency shall prepare a request for information prior to the development of a request for proposal to obtain community input and facilitate community planning activities so then I have a whole bunch of stuff written here that I already covered so I won't say it again but basically we strongly encourage you to follow these RFI's respond give us information how to build capacity how can how can we get these hard-to-reach areas or if it's not you know even so much related to this particular act 162 and rural areas if there's other ideas if you've got bright ideas bring them to the table because that that is a benefit to all of us okay solicitation and award there is much hard work well this is like where the heavy lifting is basically for the state and the provider a lot of work to be done in the solicitation and award phase first the solicitation development is done by the state and potentially like I said with input from the providers the state issues the solicitation on hands or high ePro and then the provider sees the solicitation and jumps into action who get all your people get them on get them on it then proposal development the provider begins to develop the proposal and you can ask the state questions the proposal questions are either in the orientation phase or they can be separate but they're usually always in writing if it's if it's an orientation type setup where you have a solicitation orientation meeting all those questions will be bundled up and all the answers will be provided back out to everybody so if somebody else some other provider asked a great question and it was you're gonna get the answer to that great question and so on and the same with questions that come after the orientation meeting if somebody sends you a quick one provider sends a question that's of substance you know and it is believed that all the providers should know that all of that information will go back out to everyone so no one has a dissident is that a disadvantage it's a level playing field I mean there may be some situations where it may be a very very small clarification that wouldn't be worth the effort of telling everybody but in most cases any question asked will be the answered will be provided back out to everyone so proposal development you know you need to make very be very careful and I know Harold will be covering some of this so I won't I won't belabor the point but it needs to be in the correct format whatever the solicitation requests for it has to be this many pages it has to be this many this font it needs to have this table it has to have this graph it needs to speak to this type of work and this type of work and whatever it says please do your very best to provide that proposal in the manner requested because it makes it difficult or impossible to evaluate your proposals and if it's such a deviation from the request if the deviation is in such in a way you you your proposal may be deemed non-responsive meaning it's so far out of left field that we can't even it's apples to oranges comparison everybody else proposed like they were supposed to propose and in the manner in format and and you propose something that you know something else you only wanted a piece of the work and you wanted to do it totally different than what we're asking and so we got to just go okay well no so anyway the proposal receipt you get the proposal in on time we receive it we record it proposal evaluation the propose the state will evaluate the proposal based only on the evaluation criteria presented in the solicitation it's important that your proposal dress each evaluation because criteria well so there's evaluation criteria they're defined you want to try to do well on all of those evaluation criteria your proposal should address all of the evaluation criteria and put your best foot forward and now we'll give you the best score and best likelihood that you will be awarded a contract again you can have discussions with and questions with the state and then finally contract award the state notifies the non awarded providers as well as the selected providers and then you will proceed to executing a mutually executing a contract contract management contract management is part of the procurement life cycle where you monitor and track the requirements of the contract are you doing the service that you that we're requesting are you providing the reports that were your contracted to report are you serving the community you're supposed to all of the contractual obligations at this point there is a dialogue between the contract administrator from the state and somebody in your organization that makes sure that everything is going well it's pretty simple and self-explanatory really it's just managing the contract trying to make sure that the total performance is in accordance with the contractual commitments and then closeout completion and closeout so it goes from an active contract to a closed contract basically all your final reports have submitted ever all the work is done all the money spent whatever it is the contract you're on contract for is complete all the invoices are paid and then the contract is officially closed from from the state side as well as the provider side everybody's happy and we go yay excellent contract and then this is a best practice is you know conduct a review of your lessons learned throughout every single procurement even if it's just a short meeting and say you know provider you know say to yourself you know what could have gone easier where did we you know where did we have troubles was it was it managing the contract was the proposal development a nightmare or was it easy what you know find out where you can do better and make you know performance of the contract better successful outcomes for the service population or if it's the front end just the contracting part it was was it difficult to do this do we need more in-house experience do we need to have some of our people sit with the state procurement office staff to just get a better understanding of what needs to be done or in in in these areas because we have online training you know if you have staff that's new and is inheriting a desk of somebody that's the day or you're the new contracts person there you go good luck you know give us a call you know we can we can help we want to help you succeed basically so closeout cooperative purchasing program I would like to end my part of the presentation with an additional benefit to nonprofits who partner with the state now this may be new to some of you but I know it's new to somebody in this room eligible nonprofits can purchase items from the state procurement office price and vendor list contracts so basically the state procurement office negotiates statewide contracts for a variety of goods and services gasoline computer equipment all kinds of stuff and so we negotiate at scale and and then we put those negotiated contracts price lists they're basic I mean kind of like a catalog let's just say a little bit different than a catalog but you'll understand that analogy so the cooperative purchasing agreements currently there are 98 vendor lists with thousands of items and for for all types of services like I said copiers gas computer equipment different services - and so if you have a it your nonprofit can utilize the pricing that we've negotiated if you qualify so that's the list there's 90 whatever I said 98 and you can you can keyword search and find these lists and say okay great we can get cheaper gas on Maui than we're paying we're sending our people to go fill up their you know we've got transport vans or whatever and and we can get it for 25 cents a gallon less well why wouldn't she use that you know just make sense see it's a huge advantage if you can find contracts that you can utilize it's a way that you can save money and it's a pretty clever bill that they are piece of you know legislation that's kind of just plopped in to to the 103d construction goods and services that allows for this for nonprofits so how do you do this so you have to be a tax-exempt nonprofit with a current health and human services contract so if you have all those three things you can you go on to the link here but you can find it on the SPO website and you fill out a form I mean we're the government so you gotta have a form right that forms got form then you will provide us your tax ID information from the IRS that shows that you're a certified nonprofit and then a give us documentation that you have a current health and human service contract and oftentimes because we have a database system if you just provide the contract number itself we can look it up and see if it's current and if it's current you get put on our list and then you can engage directly with those providers the the the the list providers and contact them directly and and negotiate to have those those prices and the and and and most times those prices are honored there is kind of this small loophole where we say that they don't necessarily have to honor those but I have never seen a case where a price vendor list would not honor the price that they negotiated to a non-profit it wouldn't make sense I don't know why but it's a small little loophole but I've never seen it used but in general if we've ne otiated a state-level and you can use those non-profit pricing then then you can and that's a great thing so in summary the SPO website contains reference material bidding opportunities eprocurement system tools templates forms online training please take advantage of it please call our office I hope that covering the topics today has helped existing providers as well as state procurement professionals I hope you've gained a better understanding of how to partner with the state the state procurement office is here I know I've kind of a broken record but we're here to help really that's our function we're trainers teachers policy wonks you know we're here to help you be successful that state agency and providers thank you for your attention I really appreciate you all coming out