Waste Quality Department Agency

15 May Waste Quality Department Agency

Posted at 19:37h in Client Case Studies by

Introduction
In 2014, a United States state agency began implementing the Best Value Approach (BVA) in their Waste Quality Department as a replacement to their traditional approach of procuring and managing projects. The Waste Quality Department is responsible for procuring professional environmental services to identify, assess and clean up soil/groundwater/surface water sites that were contaminated with hazardous substances throughout the state.

Pilot Test of the Best Value Approach (BVA)
To test the potential of the BVA, the client first conducted a pilot test to compare the results of the BVA to a similar project that recently completed under the client’s traditional approach. Table 1 shows the test results which identified the BVA’s dominant value.

Criteria County A (Traditional) County B     (Best Value)
Total Cost of Project $400K $138K
Overall Client Satisfaction 6/10 10/10
Project Duration (days) 730 352
% Total Schedule Deviation 150% 23%
% Schedule Deviation Due to Client – 23%
% Schedule Deviation Due to Vendor – 0%
% Cost deviation 300% 0.5%*
% of Milestone Deliverables Requiring Client Revisions 100% 0%
% of Client Time Required to Complete Vendor Milestones 50% 15%

*Deviation caused by unforeseen risk (EPA implementing new requirements)

Table 1 – Traditional vs. Best Value Approach Single Test Project Results

 

Waste Quality Department:
After the BVA showed potential in the pilot project, the BVA was used to select 10 Best Value vendors to perform services for 54 contaminated sites throughout the state. In comparing the BVA procurement process to the agency’s traditional methodology used in previous years, the BVA required 97% less time and cost with higher satisfaction (see Table 2).

Criteria % Diff Traditional BVA
Required time to evaluate proposals – 97% 180 hours 6 hours
Avg. Customer Satisfaction of process (1-10) 115% 4 8.6
Departments Administration Cost – 97% $ 81,000.00 $ 2,700.00
Departments Admin. Cost Savings $ 78,300.00
Table 2 – Overall Procurement Results

 

In the analysis of the execution of the projects the BVA project and risk management was implemented with the Weekly Risk Report and Director’s Report tools which resulted in (see table 3 and 4):

  1. Providing the client, a single system that created transparency for all stakeholders by tracking all their projects’ in terms of performance and progress in a simplistic format.
  2. Department’s project managers received 36% more work from vendors and increased their work capacity by 71%.
  3. Quality of services performed increased over time by 28%.
  4. Assisted the department to spend 100% of its budget each year [an unspent budget puts the department at risk of a lower budget in the following fiscal year, which compromises the amount of cleanup work they can perform].
  5. Project performance was improved. Overall cost and schedule overrun were 2.9% and 2.5% respectively. Major cause of all deviations on projects was the client [2.6%]. Vendors caused 0% deviation and in fact minimized time and cost for the client.

 

Performance Criteria FY14     [Before BVA] FY15 FY16 FY17
# of projects 69 60 88 47
Total budget $5.8M $5.6M $6.9M $7.9M
Total budget spent 50% 100% 100% 100%
# of Project Managers (PM) 9 7 7 7
PM work capacity (per PM) $644K $800K $986K $1.1M
Customer Satisfaction 6.9 8.3 9.0 8.8

Table 3 – Final Main Test Results

 

Completed Projects FY15 FY16 FY17
# of Projects 60 88 47
Original Awarded Cost ($$) $5.6M $6.9M $7.9M
Total % Over Budget 0.01% 1.61% 6.19%
     % due to client 0.30% 5.02% 4.25%
     % due to vendor -0.13% -0.11% -1.86%
     % due to unforeseen -0.05% 1.20% 3.50%
     % due to other -0.11% -4.51% 0.30%
Total % Delayed -0.23% 8.36% -2.12%
     % due to client -0.09% 6.50% -1.28%
     % due to vendor -0.86% -3.10% -0.32%
     % due to unforeseen 0.00% 4.19% -0.79%
     % due to other 0.72% 0.77% 0.28%

Table 4 – Final Main Test Performance Results