2017–2018
Ohio Supplier Portal: PeopleSoft, made easy for the businesses that sell to the State
Thousands of businesses sell to the State of Ohio, and until 2017 checking an order or a payment meant working through screens built for the State’s own finance staff. We designed and built the first Ohio Supplier Portal: purchase orders, invoices and payments in plain views, and a step-by-step registration for new suppliers, on top of PeopleSoft without changing it.
- 1st
- project on the State’s new digital platform, 2017
- 6
- supplier tasks in one portal: register, profile, orders, invoices, payments, dashboard
Schematic — client UI under NDA
- Client
- State of Ohio
- Industry
- Public sector
- Scope
- Service design · UX design · Registration wizard · Online invoicing · PeopleSoft integration
- Platform
- HCL Digital Experience + PeopleSoft
- Partnership
- 2017–2018
Challenge
For a business that sells to the State, the questions are simple: has my purchase order arrived, where is my invoice, when will I be paid? The answers lived in the State’s PeopleSoft financial system, and the existing supplier site exposed them through an outdated interface designed around the system, not around the supplier. Registering as a new supplier meant a long form with everything the financial system needed to set a vendor up.
The Office of Budget and Management (OBM) set out to make the Ohio Supplier Portal the front door for everyone who does, or wants to do, business with the State. The new portal had to sit on the State’s new digital platform, connect to OAKS, the State’s PeopleSoft system, and let suppliers sign in with the State’s login, without rewriting the financial system underneath.
Approach
The supplier’s questions, answered on one screen
We designed the portal around what suppliers come to check: a dashboard, and purchase orders, invoices and payments shown with their status in plain language and filters by date range and status, so a supplier can see where a payment stands without knowing how PeopleSoft organizes it. The words came from walkthroughs with OBM: “supplier”, not “vendor”, on every screen, and help text OBM can update without calling IT.
Invoicing without paperwork
The second release, in 2018, put invoicing online. A supplier opens a purchase order and invoices against it, with the order’s details already filled in, partial quantities allowed and attachments added, or submits an invoice without a purchase order; drafts can be saved, and a dashboard shows where each invoice stands. Supplier administrators can also give their own staff access. Under the hood it is PeopleSoft’s eSettlements module; on screen it is a short form.
Registration as a guided conversation
We turned supplier registration into a step-by-step wizard, built as a single-page application in Vue.js. Suppliers move forward and back through the steps without the page reloading or losing what they typed, and the portal pre-fills what they already entered when they created their account.
A new front, PeopleSoft untouched
The portal runs on the State’s digital experience platform and talks to PeopleSoft through web services and a middleware layer. That three-tier design was a first for the State: the supplier experience can change quickly, while PeopleSoft’s business rules and data stay exactly where they are.
Impact
The first release went live in 2017; the second, with online invoicing and a new responsive theme, followed in 2018. The Supplier Portal was the first project on the State’s new digital platform, then called Ohio Digital Experience and later the InnovateOhio Platform, and our first work for the State of Ohio, in a program led by Deloitte.
It proved a pattern the State kept using: put a modern, user-centered front on an established system instead of replacing it. On that foundation the State went on to release OhioPays.
