Wednesday, July 25, 2012
To: All Certified Procurement Officers
Date: July 25, 2012
Subject: Procurement Procedures for Information Technology (IT) and Telecommunication (Telecom) Acquisitions
E-Pro Implementation
General Information
Agencies were notified in ITPIM-04 about the e-Pro Process and the approaching implementation. This announcement is to serve as a reminder to your agency that the 115 paper process of approvals by the Information Services Division (ISD) for IT purchases will be discontinued and all e-Procurement training must be completed or you will no longer be able to continue with IT purchases. p According to our current agency roll out plan, all agencies should have necessary training completed by Aug. 31, 2012.
The new business process for all IT purchases will be to submit an ePro requisition via PeopleSoft. We anticipate having all agencies functional by late August. ISD procurement will no longer accept paper requests for IT purchases after Sept. 1, 2012.
Required Personnel Attendance at Training
It will be your agency’s responsibility to have all ePro requestors, accounting validation personnel, certified procurement officer(s) and requisition approvers trained before your agency can go live with the ePro process. The four roles indicated above are personnel that must be identified on the Office of State Finance (OSF) security forms prior to going live. The forms and instructions are mentioned in the ePro training (forms 301ePro, 301, and 301a). A current Department of Central Services (DCS) Form 001 should also be on file with Central Purchasing, with a cc to Linda Belinski (see further instructions in the coursework manuals). At least one person per role will need to attend training for your agency to go live, and individuals can perform dual roles. Personnel indentified as requisition approvers on the DCS Form 001 should be the same personnel identified as requisition approvers on the OSF Form 301ePro.
Once your agency is live with ePro, any new hires for your agency may be trained onsite (by your agency personnel who have attended the training themselves).
Personnel Changes After Go-Live
Please be certain to notify the appropriate parties of any changes to personnel which may impact the security and/or workflow. When personnel leave your organization the OSF Service Desk and Linda Belinski should be notified to remove their access. To add new personnel, forms should be submitted to Linda.Belinski@osk.ok.gov.
New Process for Electronic Document Storage
Effective Sept. 1, 2012, the State of Oklahoma Chief Information Officer (CIO) will require the storage of all procurement files electronically within the purchase order in PeopleSoft. This includes any attachments, quotes, Word, Excel, PDFs, etc. This policy will be for all purchase orders regardless of whether the purchase order was created by the agency or another agency on their behalf.
P-card Purchases
The process for P-card purchases does not change until after your agency goes live with ePro requisitions. The ISD manual (to be covered in class) will include the process for P-card purchases for ePro requisitions.
Training Dates
Training dates have been set and are currently in progress. If you have not yet signed up, please do so as soon as possible. Please ensure that all agency personnel that will need to use ePro, sign up for classes as well. As with all PeopleSoft applications, training must be attended prior to access being granted to the agency.
For those agencies who did not received ISD procedure training with the CORE training, please review the ISD procedures and determine if any of your staff will need additional training and enroll in the remaining classes.
If your agency requires special assistance with training or are located remotely, we may consider traveling to your location. Please advise us if this is the case.
Coursework Materials
The ePro Training Manuals may be accessed at the following CORE link:
http://www.ok.gov/cio/Customer_Portal/Business_Application_Services_Essentials/Financials/
A Separate ISD procedure manual, titled "IT and Telecom ePro Requisition Procedures," will be added to the Procurement page on the CIO website and placed under the Popular Links section. This page is located at:
http://www.ok.gov/cio/Procurement/
How to Enroll
TO ENROLL: Please contact your agency’s nominating official (as identified and communicated to the CORE Group at ISD), who may then e-mail attendance to tara.hills@osf.ok.gov.
**Please print and bring your coursework to class with you. The ePro coursework(s) is located at the two links above (ePro manuals and ISD procedure manual).
Your patience and cooperation with this matter is appreciated. We ask that you hold individual questions until after training to reduce repeated communication and high volume inquiries. Urgent questions that cannot wait until class attendance, which are not covered in this email should be sent to the OSF Service Desk at helpdesk@osf.ok.gov.