Case Study: County of Santa Clara achieves rapid, compliant cloud procurement with SAP Ariba

How can a Silicon Valley mindset build a cloud for government procurement

County of Santa Clara, home to Silicon Valley and 1.8 million residents, manages a $6.1 billion budget with roughly one-third dedicated to purchasing goods and services. Its procurement department faced a 150% surge in information and processing requests and needed faster, more compliant, and more transparent purchasing processes to make better use of taxpayer dollars and improve budget forecasting.

The county implemented a cloud-based SAP Ariba suite to automate the entire procurement lifecycle, consolidate contracts and transactions, and move to electronic purchase orders and standardized catalogs. As a result, 90% of requests are completed within one business day (versus four weeks previously), supplier approval time fell by 80%, more than 400 contracts totaling $1.5 billion are bought electronically each year, supplier e-transactions rose to 40%, and overall transparency and public trust significantly improved.

County of Santa Clara

Jenti Vandertuig

Chief Procurement Officer