Winter Haven rolls out OpenGov procurement platform to widen vendor pool and speed bid Q&A

Winter Haven’s procurement team has launched the OpenGov procurement module to broaden vendor outreach and streamline solicitation management, Procurement Officer Bethany Owen told the City Commission.

Owen said the city is already seeing a notable jump in engagement: solicitations that once drew “one, two, three, potentially four” responses are now attracting “upward of 8 to 12” responses, and one recent posting had been viewed 464 times in two weeks. She told commissioners the platform’s subscription feature automatically notifies thousands of firms when solicitations matching their interests are posted.

The platform groups documents, Q&A, deadlines and site-visit RSVPs in one place. “When their question is asked, we’ll answer it as quickly as we can,” Owen said, describing a living Q&A feed that posts answers immediately instead of waiting to compile formal addenda. Owen also showed vendor-analytics dashboards that track views, followers and downloads and an email log that records successful deliveries and bounces.

Owen highlighted a library of roughly 55,000 solicitations across OpenGov that staff can draw from as templates and an AI tool to generate draft scopes for routine services. She said those features should reduce staff time spent creating solicitations and help smaller firms respond.

City Manager (staff) framed the change as part of a broader push for “responsible government” and said the procurement and transparency modules together improve documentation of outreach, “so when vendors say ‘I didn’t know anything about this,’ we have a record of emails sent.”

Commissioners asked about what vendor profile fields are collected and whether some demographic options could be disabled for a Florida-specific deployment. One commissioner asked, “Why would we need to know if someone is LGBTQ plus?”; staff replied that certain profile fields exist in the nationwide product but that the city would follow up with OpenGov about a Florida-friendly or blinded setup and noted the vendor-certification classification (for DBE, etc.) is useful for federally funded projects.

Staff also discussed how the platform handles bid tabulation and evaluation: it can rank low-cost bids, create bid tabulation sheets and allow evaluation teams to score qualifications inside the system. Staff said some manual checks (for bond validation and responsiveness) will still be required and that local preference calculations can be reviewed and applied as part of staff oversight.

Staff proposed outreach such as how‑to videos and chamber demonstrations to help local small businesses use the system. Owen said staff would return with follow-up data in six months showing local versus nonlocal respondent rates and other metrics.

The commission did not take a formal vote on procurement policies in the provided transcript; the presentation closed with staff offering to bring additional information back to commissioners for follow-up.