City of Tucson increases transparency of spending

Understanding spending

Local governments must contend with shrinking budgets while still meeting the demand to provide the public with easy-to-digest information. In Tucson, Arizona, the city’s procurement department turned to DXC Technology’s spotlightonspend service and its spend analysis toolset, called the Observatory, to analyze spend data and publish complex financial information in a format that could be easily accessed and understood by citizens.

With a population of more than 530,000 within the city limits, Tucson is the second-largest city in Arizona and among the 40 largest cities in the United States. The city employs about 5,000 people and operates with a budget of more than $1.4 billion.

City procurement officials wanted a service that could accurately classify and enrich their spend data — so they could drive savings and efficiency projects — and a service that would provide them with results that could be presented to the public in a user-friendly format. Developed by Spikes Cavell, a wholly-owned subsidiary of DXC, spotlightonspend is a managed service that includes the capture, transformation, management and presentation of expenditure data in a format that is relevant, meaningful and accessible to the public.

Data transformation

Marcheta Gillespie, director of procurement, City of Tucson, says spotlightonspend and the Observatory have been instrumental in helping the city transform its data. “It’s great to have someone else do work that we simply don’t have time to do and that benefits us directly,” Gillespie says. “That enables us to more easily tackle projects … to help deal with the city’s financial challenges.”

With DXC’s help, the city launched the spotlightonspend Tucson website, which provides citizens access to Tucson’s spend information on goods, services and construction projects. The site, which has an intuitive user interface, is maintained, updated and enhanced by DXC.

Quick access to essential data

One of the immediate benefits of deploying the Observatory was helping the procurement department respond more quickly to information inquiries from citizens, the media and various city entities. “They might ask how much we’ve spent on something or how much has gone to a specific contractor,” Gillespie says. Prior to implementing the Observatory, procurement had to assemble raw data and create a report, which would typically take a week or longer.

Now the city can quickly access the Observatory and get the data in a much more timely and efficient manner.

Without the solutions, “we’d still be operating with multiple sources of information, compiling things every time there was a request for information,” Gillespie says. “With the Observatory, we have a place to go and get lots of different angles on our data.”

City purchases of $5,000 or less that are not on a contract must be made through a purchasing card (pCard) issued by the procurement department. According to Gillespie, the Observatory is helping the city monitor and analyze pCard spending. “Getting this right means increased efficiencies for the city as well as increased revenues through the pCard program,” she says.

The Observatory is also helping the city comply with a city ordinance that gives local contractors a competitive preference in contract bids. The solution allows the procurement department to identify spend with local and small businesses and report the data to the mayor and city council.

Download the Success Story and visit DXC Spend Analytics for more information about our spend and procurement solutions.