The County of Maui Purchasing Division is proud to announce a new partnership with Public Purchase, a web based e-Procurement service. The purpose of this new service is to provide the County of Maui with additional e-procurement capabilities in order to improve efficiencies between the County of Maui and the contracting community The initial benefit of the e-procurement system will be that the County of Maui will now have a vendor registration function. Until now, we were unable to post construction bid documents on our website because the County of Maui had no way of knowing who was downloading our specifications, or who might be planning to submit a bid. Posting construction bid documents on our website would have been unacceptable to the subcontracting community, who need to know which general contractors to submit a bid to. With the use of the Public Purchase system, a planholders list will be available to anyone who has registered on the Public Purchase system. The County of Maui will implement the Public Purchase system slowly, starting with construction projects. We want to start slowly so that we all can become familiar with the use of the software, and be able to deal with the learning curve on a small scale. For the initial implementation, we will continue to list our projects on our website, with a link to the Public Purchase website for construction projects. Once we become more comfortable, we plan to expand it to all of our non-construction solicitations for all goods and services, with a direct link from the County of Maui home page. For construction contractors needing plans and specifications for a project listed on Public Purchase, or subcontractors who just want to see which general contractors are bidding, you will need to complete the two step vendor registration process outlined below. If you are a non-construction vendor, we will still post the notifications DANILO F. AGSALOG Director MARK R. WALKER Deputy Director ALAN M. ARAKAWA Mayor separately, but we encourage you to register now as it is our intention to expand this to all of our solicitations. One note on implementation: Our counterparts at the County of Hawaii have been using Public Purchase for a few months now. They informed us that their only implementation problem was that some of their vendors failed to realize that you have to register twice; once with Public Purchase and once with the County of Maui. So please note that you have to register twice as detailed below: