Business Made Easier
We showed our true-blue Singaporean spirit as a nation of shoppers always out for the best deals by developing the Government electronic Business (GeBIZ) 2.0!
A one-stop procurement portal where suppliers can engage the entire public sector, GeBIZ 2.0 provides a centralised platform for public agencies to publish their purchase requirements. This allows suppliers to identify business opportunities quickly, bid for them conveniently, and manage transactions easily. For public agencies, the streamlined workflows and guided procurement improves productivity. They are also able to leverage analytics to perform market research, which enables more informed decisions and better planning of procurement strategies.
Working closely with the Ministry of Finance (MOF), our team tapped DSTA’s business knowledge and technical capabilities gained from past experiences to build GeBIZ 2.0 from scratch.
“We saw value in transforming the user experience, and we wanted to provide a more efficient system to better support public procurement,” said Deputy Head (Supplier System) Zhuo Peishan.
To design a transformative user experience, the team adopted the design principle of ‘Understand, Learn, Prototype’. To understand the issue, they conducted multiple user surveys, workshops and interviews, as well as analysed past records and gathered feedback from a diverse group of suppliers. They then engaged industry experts to learn the best practices in design thinking and user experience design. This was followed by creating, testing and reviewing prototypes iteratively, which helped the team develop a tangible vision map of what GeBIZ 2.0 needed.
“One of our key challenges was to meet the needs of different user groups. Our iterative development approach allowed us to enhance GeBIZ 2.0 continuously by building new features as we heard back from the users. This has helped make GeBiz 2.0 intuitive and easy to use,” said Principal Engineer (Enterprise IT) Choo Chee Seng.
The prototype was put through its paces with an actual user trial, through which the team was able to gather even more feedback to further evolve the platform into an effective and user-centric system.
Today, GeBIZ 2.0 is used by all public agencies to procure a wide range of products and services from the commercial market. By consolidating procurement-related information from various agencies, it allows for smoother transactions and most of all, a better user experience.