Cal Poly seeks to transform procurement process with generative AI-powered scope of work generation

In today’s complex procurement landscape, creating comprehensive and accurate statements of work scopes can present a challenge for university procurement teams. At California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly), procurement specialists manage over $190 million in annual spending across diverse commodity areas, many requiring detailed work scopes.

The scale of this challenge is substantial. Procurement specialists must rapidly develop expertise across multiple commodity areas while ensuring work scopes are clear, comprehensive, and fair to all prospective suppliers. Without standardized tools, this process creates additional workload burden and potential delays in the procurement process.

To address this growing challenge, the Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub) at Cal Poly—powered by HAQM Web Services (AWS) and part of the AWS Cloud Innovation Centers (CIC) program—took action. The DxHub collaborated with the university’s Strategic Business Services department to create “Scope Builder,” a generative AI-powered application that aims to revolutionize how procurement specialists develop work scopes for university requests for proposals (RFPs) and contracts. Now in pilot, Scope Builder is demonstrating how it will save Cal Poly procurement team members time developing work scopes.

Leveraging generative AI to optimize the work scope generation process

Scope Builder represents a paradigm shift in procurement document generation. The application uses generative AI to assist procurement specialists during the work scope development process, helping them produce detailed and comprehensive documents. Through a conversational AI interface, the system guides users through the process of creating work scopes, drawing from established best industry practices and relevant past contracts.

The solution’s impact extends beyond simple document generation. By streamlining the work scope development process, Scope Builder advances a broader initiative in university procurement: achieving consistency across all procurement documents while maintaining efficiency and quality. This workflow includes final review and editing of generated word documents by the procurement specialist to ensure a quality output.

Building a robust, reliable solution

Scope Builder’s architecture—as shown in the following diagram—employs several managed AWS services to ensure security, scalability, and reliability. The front-end application is built using React and hosted on HAQM Simple Storage Service (HAQM S3), with HAQM CloudFront providing secure content delivery. The backend uses AWS Lambda for serverless compute functions, while HAQM Bedrock and the Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 model power the sophisticated natural language processing capabilities. To ensure data security, HAQM Bedrock inputs and model outputs are not shared with any model providers.

 The system’s intelligent features enable real-time drafting of work scopes, section by section, based on user input and established best practices. A particularly powerful feature is its context-aware search and replace functionality, allowing users to make intelligent edits that maintain document coherence and relevance.

Figure 1: Architectural diagram of the solution described in this blog. The major components are an HAQM S3 bucket, HAQM CloudFront, HAQM Lambda, and HAQM Bedrock resources.

“Scope Builder can help us transform our procurement process,” said Darin Mathews, Cal Poly’s chief procurement officer. “What used to require extensive research and multiple revisions can now be completed more efficiently, with higher accuracy and consistency. This allows our team to focus on strategic procurement decisions rather than document formatting.”

Giving students real-world problem-solving experiences

At the Cal Poly DxHub, students work alongside university staff and HAQM employees to develop innovative solutions for public sector challenges using HAQM’s Working Backwards methodology. For Gus Flusser, the student developer behind Scope Builder, the experience provided a unique learn-by-doing opportunity to apply AI application development skills.

“Working at the DxHub gives me the opportunity to build solutions that solve real-world problems for real-world customers,” commented Gus. “Learning to harness cutting-edge technologies such as generative AI to build these solutions has been incredibly rewarding. Working on projects like these has pushed me to develop myself as an engineer, improve my teamwork and project management skills, allowed me to work with so many amazing people, and so much more.”

“Projects like Scope Builder are great examples of the experiential learning Cal Poly students get at the DxHub,” remarked Ryan Matteson, director of technology and training at DxHub. “Our collaborative innovation partnership with AWS provides our students with real-world public sector development experience to help them be day-one ready upon graduation.”

Reshaping the future of procurement with generative AI

As procurement processes become increasingly complex and the volume of university spending continues to grow, the need for efficient work scope generation tools will only increase. The partnership between the DxHub and Cal Poly’s Strategic Business Services demonstrates how generative AI can be leveraged to solve procurement challenges while maintaining the high standards required for public sector procurement.

To learn more about Scope Builder and how it could help your institution’s procurement process, read this article about the solution or email Darin Matthews.

Figure 2: DX Hub Team: Dhvani Goel, Pallavi Das, Nasrullah Ahmed, Noor Dhaliwal, Sharon Liang, Darren Kraker, Taran Singh, Nick Osterbur, Ryan Matteson, Gus Flusser, Isaac Rudnick, Swayam Chidrawar, Nick Riley, Spandan Suthar, Belal Elshenety.

About the DXHub

Launched in 2017 as the first Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) housed in an institution of higher education, the Cal Poly DxHub provides opportunities for nonprofits, educational bodies, and government agencies to collaborate on their most pressing challenges, test new ideas, and access the technological expertise of AWS to help create cloud-based solutions. To learn more about the Cal Poly Digital Transformation Hub and how your organization can engage, email Nick Osterbur or visit the DxHub website.

Learn more about the AWS CIC program.

Contributing AWS Authors: Jan Day, Patrick Frontiera, Nick Osterbur, and Darren Kraker