By Jeff Erlichman

www.sewp.nasa.gov is your home for online SEWP.

SEWP has significantly increased its tracking and communication between the vendor and customer, again playing a conduit role.

The SEWP website at www.sewp.nasa.gov is loaded with information to make your SEWP experience a pleasant one. Background documents and FAQs answer practically every conceivable question and the “Fast Access” tool bar makes navigation easy. The SEWP team is constantly working to upgrade the system tools. Long term projects will provide ongoing improvements and enhancements in the Save Function, Q&A and Product Category functions. Look for improvements in the printing and downloading of quotes and comments on canceled RFQs.

Use Credit Cards To Pay

Web tools are always important noted Joanne Woytek, SEWP PM. One of the newest will allow SEWP customers to pay with credit cards. This is all part of the SEWP effort to reduce paper. “Why create it, why not just push a button and have the order go out. And then it will come to us. We’ll still be tracking it all but it will be done electronically now rather than having a bunch of paper,” said Woytek.

Here’s how it works according to Woytek.

The customer goes to the SEWP website and creates their request for quote (RFQ). If the purchase is under $3,000 there are very few rules. Usually, you can specify a particular supplier.

For orders over $3000, it is especially helpful for you to get three bids and there are tools which help you to do that easily. In a couple of days, customers receive an electronic response back.

When you’ve made your decision, you say ‘this is the company I’ve selected’ and which activates a window where you can enter your name, how to get in touch with you and where are you going to send this to. Then you push a button that sends an electronic notification to SEWP. The order is then formatted which and sent to the vendor. This is followed up with a phone call for credit card information.

Provide More Information

“We are just trying to simplify steps a bit more for our customers and we have significantly increased our tracking and communication between the vendor and customer, again playing a conduit role,” explained Woytek.

“We’ve got a tool for our vendors so that they can easily update information such as ‘this is going to be late or this has shipped, I have an issue.’ From the vendor’s point we are trying to increase customer service by sending an email to the customer keeping them up to date if there’s a delay or if there’s an issue and giving them an opportunity to answer back if they have questions.”

The most recent change made is providing shipping status. “Now we update the customer on the shipping status and when it’s been shipped. So now the customer gets a notice saying be ready, it’s coming. It’s a simple change from a tool but it’s already having a positive effect.”

One of Woytek’s favorite stories is about an instance where there was a notice of a delivery delay. “Because they are required to tell us, it went to the customer and the customer said, ‘this is for a Navy ship that’s shipping out next week and if it doesn’t get here next week, the ship is gone’.”

“We asked the vendor to expedite it, and they did,” said Woytek. “We are very proud of that.”