Explanation
BACKGROUND: This legislation is for the option to establish three (3) Universal Term Contracts (UTC's) for Miscellaneous Industrial Hardware for various City agencies. These contracts will provide for the purchase of miscellaneous items needed to maintain the operations within City departments, currently not on any City contracts. The Purchasing Office has accepted three (3) proposals from companies that provide a wide range of miscellaneous hardware that City agencies currently purchase from the State of Ohio Co-Operative contracts or informal bids. These three (3) proposals are from Fastenal, SID Tool Inc. dba MSC Industrial Supply Co.; and W.W. Grainger. All three have offered a discount percentage off all items in their catalogs. Starting in January 2014, the City of Columbus has embarked on a implementing a new e- catalog, as approved by Ordinance 1078-2013. This catalog system, purchased from Vinimaya, Inc., will allow City agencies to shop City contracts. The requesting agency will log into the e-catalog, search for the item needed and the e-catalog will search all City contracts, including these three (3) suppliers, bringing back the results that meet the searched term and providing the user with the contracted price. End users will be able to select the item that best fits the operational need at the best price.
The City will upload into the e-catalog most catalog-type and price list type UTC contracts. Currently, the City has no general Maintenance, Repair, and Operations UTC’s. It is difficult to award an MRO UTC through a solicitation as the product line is varied and the City is unable to predict with much accuracy what and how much will be purchased. By uploading these three catalogs to the e-catalog, the agencies will be able to search, review and order the needed items at discounted prices. Therefore, the selected suppliers will be in a sense bidding within the e-catalog system each time a city user searches and compares it...
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