Considerations for improvement

1. Readiness to adopt the mandatory vendor performance management controls

Observation

A set of Vendor Relationship Management Procedures and Guidelines have been drafted and will be presented to the Council in the upcoming months (preferably April 2020 or May 2020) as suggested by management. We noted that protocols for vendor performance evaluation for service providers have been established in the draft procedures and would be communicated to contract/vendor relationship owners once approved.

Consideration

We recommend that the owners of significant contracts start to prepare for the implementation by reviewing vendor performance expectations and documenting baseline performance results/evaluations informally prior to the formal requirement.

The City may wish to consider one contract with joint responsibilities or multiple contracts with the same vendor and anticipate how each scenario impacts the process for evaluations.

2. Effective review of supervisor log for completion

Observation:

Supervisors retain logs for each winter operation event. The log records the details of operations and serves as the main source for calculating operating hours, and thereby payments, for each of the contractor trucks. In order to pay, or apply penalties, to different categories of cost, the log indicates that the supervisors is to record call in time, and for each truck, arrival time, standby starts and ends time, shift starts and ends time, truck breakdown starts and ends time as well as trucks which did not show up on call. From our sample of 76 supervisor logs (38 for the east side and 38 for the west side covering December 2017, December 2018, January 2019 and February 2019), we noted a few cases where the supervisor logs were not completed consistently. As a result, the supervisor log may not be reliable to completely capture contractor hours, or may incur additional effort to determine so.

Furthermore, there are numerous days in both seasons where the GPS records for multiple trucks were not available. We were able to extract 9,362 truck operating hours from the GPS database while the City paid 10,092 operating hours for the same period. The difference of 730 hours are mainly caused by GPS data loss or GPS system malfunction.

Consideration:

Operations should mandate critical time points including call in time, arrival time, shift start and end time, equipment breakdown start and duration/end time to be recorded in Supervisor Log for each event and for each truck. Such records should be captured and retained.

The Technical Team should review the supervisor logs and time cards after each event date to check the completeness of the information captured. For any missing time records, the Technical Team should follow up with the supervisors immediately. Management may wish to explore the cost/benefit of using automation to capture the data within the entire process using technology.

Operations team should notify the supplier for any GPS malfunction noted during the operations right away and request issues to be resolved on a timely basis.