iBuy Home Page

As part of the iBuy project, the District is preparing to transition our purchasing processes over to the new SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) system later this Spring. Part of that transition will involve replacing the codes we use to uniquely identify the products & services we buy.

As of Monday, January 31st, we will start to use the UNSPSC list to identify products and services.

What does this mean to my work? Starting January 31st, please refer to the UNSPSC identifiers in place of the NIGP codes in all of your purchasing activities:

You may view a list of the new UNSPSC identifiers or a conversion table for the most common commodities by clicking on the graphics below. You may save a copy of the conversion table or the UNSPSC list by right-clicking the appropriate graphic and selecting the <save target as> option. . These documents are also available on the Quick Links menu in the lower right-hand side of the Procurement website at: https://www.ocps.net/intranet/op/procurement/Pages/default.aspx

If you have questions about these codes, please contact the Procurement team at procurement@ocps.net

The NIGP Commodity/Services Code is an acronym for the National Institute of Governmental Purchasing Commodity Services Code. The NIGP Code is a coding taxonomy used primarily to classify products and services procured by state and local governments in the United States.

UNSPSC is an acronym for the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code, which classifies products and services for use in eCommerce. The UNSPSC list was jointly developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Dun & Bradstreet Corporation in 1998 and is currently maintained by GS1 US.

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iBuy Rollout Plans Adjusted:

Users Will Go Live in Two Waves

In early January, the iBuy team announced that the rollout schedule will be modified slightly to allow for more testing and system preparation time. The details of the schedule change include:

- Wave-1 users will be brought online March 7th instead of February 7th.

- Online training will be available for Wave-1 users starting February 10th instead of the original January 10th.

- Wave-1 participants have not changed. Wave-1 includes those involved in the purchasing process at Audubon Park ES, Wolf Lake ES, Gotha MS and Boone HS as well as several departments who work directly with the purchasing process. Impacted departments will be notified and trained by their representatives on the iBuy team.

- All other users will be part of Wave-2 and they will begin using iBuy April 4th. If your school or department is not specifically notified that you are in Wave-1, then you are part of Wave-2.

- Online training for Wave-2 users will begin in late February.

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Wave-1 Schools

The first wave of schools will be quite small and focused with only four schools participating. They will go live with iBuy/SRM on March 7th.

Online training for the Wave-1 school-based users (mostly Bookkeepers, Principals and other staff impacted by iBuy) will begin February 10th. Training for employees assigned to the departments impacted by Wave-1 of iBuy will be notified of their training opportunities directly by their team representatives.

Note: (See more about the GoLive dates and training dates by visiting the Training page or the Schedule and Plan page of this site)

The four schools in Wave-1 are shown below:

Wave-2 Schools

All remaining schools will be in Wave-2 and go live with the new iBuy/SRM tools on April 4th.

Wave-2 online training starts February 24th.

iBuy Champions Program Announced

As part of our preparation for the rollout of iBuy and the new features that come with Supplier Relationship Management, the team has started a program to involve key users around the District. Representatives from most schools and departments are being designated by their leadership as iBuy Champions.

The role of an iBuy Champion includes:

- helping to identify users who may need training or communication at the Champion's location,

- seeking to understand the new system so they can potentially answer basic questions about SRM for those at their work location,

- potentially participating in testing of the new system (on a volunteer basis as their schedule allows),

- and gathering feedback on the new system and the project to help the team make any adjustments to the training, communication or rollout plans based on the needs of its user community.

Many of the Department Champions are already involved in the iBuy project as Subject Matter Experts (SME's) and some even spend time in the iBuy workroom each week. Many of the schools who have named a Champion selected their Bookkeeper or Secretary for the role since they are so actively involved in the purchasing process today. Others chose Assistant Principals, Tech Coordinators and even a few Principals.

Activities for the Champions will start to pick up in November and December once the system is turned over for testing and the opportunities for involvement become more defined.

iBuy Team Demonstrates More New Features!

TheiBuy team successfully demonstrated more new features that will be part of the District's Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) system this month in the iBuy Team Room at the Education Leadership Center (ELC). Representatives from Finance, Budget, Procurement and ICTS were present to review the demonstrated features and sign off on how well they met the District's needs.

Shopping Cart: The first major feature that was demonstrated is called a Shopping Cart. For anyone who has shopped online at sites such as Amazon.com, you have seen this tool. An electronic Shopping Cart provides the online buyer with a place to collect items as they shop - much like the real shopping cart you push around the aisles of a brick and mortar store like Target. The iBuy shopping cart also does much, much more than that because it also contains a lot of data about the items it holds. The team will share more of those details on the Features page of this website soon.

Punchout! Another big feature demonstrated by the team was the ability to do an external vendor Punchout. Punchout is a term that refers to the ability of a buyer to use the District's SAP/SRM system to access District Enterprise Warehouse items and items available from external providers such as Office Depot using the same interface and within the same transaction. In the demo, the team showed how a buyer could load items in their shopping cart from the Enterprise Warehouse, then "punch out" using the internet to the online catalog for Office Depot and add more items from their catalog onto the same order.

Look for more details on the punchout feature soon. In fact, the team is working on a series of brief online demonstrations of these first two features that should be ready in early November.

To see a few snapshots of the detailed process that was demonstrated by the iBuy team at the July 28th Demo Event, click the graphic below or visit the Communication Page by clicking the link in the left sidebar.

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After conducting the demonstration and signoff for the first two packages, the iBuy team jumped right into the next group of work called "Package-3". As we described in July, all of this work will follow a proven methodology known as "ASAP". To learn more about how the work will unfold over the coming months, click the graphic below or click the ASAP-101 link on the left sidebar.

In the 'Realization" phase of ASAP, the team steps through the processes used by employees today to purchase items as they also consider how to design the future processes. This design will result in system configuration choices that will be built into SRM and then tested. The team has broken out the work of the "Realization" phase into 7 "Packages" and started by focusing on the first two packages during June and July.

Watch for more news about how the team is progressing on "Realizing" these scenarios over the coming weeks.

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iBuy will result in some significant changes to our SAP system and the processes behind it. IT will streamline the way we buy products, pay for them and put them into inventory. For users, the changes will result in an experience similar to online shopping.

Watch the Features page over the coming months to learn more about all the things coming with iBuy and our SAP Supplier Relationship Management implementation.

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One of the objectives of the iBuy project is to involve real users in creating the solution. To that end, the iBuy team will seek volunteers from time to time from across the District to participate in project activities.

By participating in activities such as testing or reviewing the system, users will build advanced understanding of SRM and the team will come up with an overall better solution.

Contact the iBuy team if you are interested in participating in any of the upcoming testing activities. You can click the Graphic below or use the Contact the iBuy Team link on the left sidebar.

This optional user involvement is NOT to be confused with the training that ALL users will have access to prior to Go Live.