State of Ohio
Supplier Portal
Base22 designed the user interface and implemented the first release of a Supplier Portal for a State Government
Challenge
With the InnovateOhio Platform initiative, the State of Ohio planned and coordinated with agencies and entities to build a complete ecosystem that would act as a “one-stop shop” for people who are, or would like to be, doing business with the State. This included suppliers and vendors, and their main point of contact: the Ohio Supplier Portal. The existing website covered financial information, transactions, and onboarding processes with an outdated, difficult-to-use UI. The new portal had to integrate PeopleSoft financial systems, meet IOP requirements and leverage OH|ID, the Ohio’s State Digital Identity Standard, which integrated unique IDs with the rest of the State’s digital ecosystem.
Solution
Base22 designed the user interface and implemented the first release of the Supplier Portal, which focused on enabling existing suppliers to view information about their financial transactions with the state, including the status of purchase orders, invoices, and payments. It also included an online application to allow prospective new suppliers to register with the State and provide all the information required to set them up in the State’s financial systems.
This solution was the first project implemented under the State of Ohio DAS Ohio Digital Experience platform (IOP). The InnovateOhio Platform has 4 pillars, with Base22 being responsible for the Digital Experience Platform and Portal Services and the Reusable User Experience Patterns, which are as follows:
- HCL Digital Experience Platform and Portal Services.
- Reusable User Experience Patterns.
- Enterprise Identity.
- Fraud and Risk Analysis.
The Supplier Registration form was built as a single-page application (SPA) using the Vue.js framework. This allows users to easily navigate back and forth through the different screens of the form wizard without ever having to reload the page from the server. This design delivers faster performance for the user, which results in a better-perceived experience.
Where appropriate, the Supplier Portal applications query the enterprise identity management system to get attributes of the current user to pre-populate certain fields with data that the user has previously entered as part of their account setup.
This solution was also the first of its kind for the State of Ohio using a three-tiered architecture of DX Portal, SOA Middleware, and PeopleSoft web services. As such, it demonstrates the advantages of the approach, which include the flexibility to modify the front-end design without impacting the business logic and data model of the source system, as well as the agility to do so quickly.
Since laying the foundation with Base22’s Supplier Portal project, the State of Ohio has continued with their digital evolution and released the OhioPays site.
