The City of Redlands Purchasing Division was recently named a recipient of the “Achievement of Excellence in Procurement” Award for the third straight year from the National Procurement Institute, an organization that promotes excellence in governmental and institutional procurement.

The AEP Award annually recognizes organizational excellence in public procurement. Award criteria are designed to measure innovation, professionalism, productivity, e-procurement and leadership attributes of the procurement function.

The City of Redlands is one of only 45 agencies in California and one of only 68 cities in the United States and Canada to receive the award.

In April 2015 the City implemented its eProcurement system, which transformed the manual procurement process into an electronic one, allowing the City to gain greater knowledge of what its buying, greater visibility into every stage of the procurement process and increased savings and efficiency due to competition. The system makes the procurement process transparent, providing electronic bid notifications, automatic quote tabulations and award notifications and reducing opportunity for fraud and corruption due to automated procedures. The eProcurement system is available to vendors at the City’s website at http://www.cityofredlands.org/BidsRFPs