MEMBER CENTER
LAP is Louisiana’s premier procurement destination; whether you’re purchasing industrial cleaning supplies or heavy equipment, LAP facilitates and streamlines the buying cycle with our innovative procurement tools and wrap-around consulting services. Understanding when to use these tools will help buyers achieve the most cost savings.
What is the Louisiana Purchasing Alliance?
LAP was formed to utilize Title 39:1702 of the Louisiana Revised Statutes to create an Alliance of parishes and municipalities (and eventually other buyers) for the purpose of cooperatively purchasing supplies, services, major repairs and even construction projects
Cooperative purchasing (as opposed to simple piggy-backing) allows public procurement units to aggregate purchasing volumes, standardize specifications, simplify procurement activities for all buyers, secure better pricing based on higher volumes and even even streamline the selling process for Louisiana vendors (i.e., respond to one large RFP vs. potentially dozens)
The Louisiana Purchasing Alliance manages all aspects of creating, structuring and marketing of contracts identified by LAP at no cost to Alliance members. In conjunction with Alliance Members, LAP will manage all aspects of the Alliance’s procurement activities on its e-procurement platform, and in full compliance with State procurement laws.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Let’s say your municipality needs to purchase manhole covers...
Analyze: The municipal buyer analyzes its current supply of manhole covers and its history of purchases to determine the quantity needed, the delivery timeframe and available budget.
Develop: Specifications are determined and provided to the BidBoardLA support team. The support team helps determines the best procurement method—reverse auction, sealed bid or contract catalog approach—and makes a recommendation to the buyer for approval.
Qualify: The support team provides the LAP buyer with a list of potential vendors.
Negotiate: In a reverse auction, for example, the support team uploads the RFQ and specifications and notifies qualified vendors of the process. Bids are received in real-time and made available to the buyer for viewing.
Evaluate: The system ranks bids automatically and provides evaluation tools to the buyer.
Award: The buyer selects the winner(s)
