Overview
The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC Water) — the eighth-largest water and wastewater utility in the United States, serving more than 1.5 million customers across two Maryland counties — was running its permitting, plan review, inspections, licensing, and workflow operations on paper and mainframe-era systems. WSSC engaged tieBridge to lead the transformation end to end: to define what the new system had to do, run the procurement, select and negotiate with a vendor, and manage the implementation.
The challenge
WSSC needed to modernize a high-volume, revenue-critical operation without disruption:
- Permitting, plan review, inspections, licensing, and workflow all ran on paper and mainframe-era systems (IDMS, FOCUS, Oracle), with customers physically visiting a "One Stop Shop" and waiting days for manual data entry before they could even schedule an inspection.
- Roughly 34,000 permit transactions a year, plus about 2,500 licenses and all plumbing and gas-fitting inspections for two counties — high volume, manual fee calculation, and error-prone re-keying that caused revenue loss.
- More than ten overlapping legacy systems and tracking spreadsheets needed to be replaced by a single integrated, web-architected, workflow-based, GIS-enabled platform — Commission-managed rather than vendor-hosted.
- The new solution had to integrate deeply with existing GIS, e-plan-review and document management, customer and assessment systems, interactive voice response, and financial and payment systems.
- WSSC wanted a standard business process across its business units, and a commercial product configured — not customized — so it could be upgraded as new releases arrived.
Our role across the engagement lifecycle
tieBridge's role spanned the entire project — continuity that carried the same requirements-grounded context from definition all the way through to a working system: requirements development, competitive landscape assessment, qualified bidder identification, procurement orchestration, proposal evaluation, solution-demonstration guidance, vendor recommendation, contract negotiation, and implementation management.
From the One Stop Shop to any screen
Before the project, plumbers, gas-fitters, developers, builders, and homeowners had to appear in person at WSSC's "One Stop Shop" in Laurel, Maryland — filling out paper forms, waiting on manual fee calculations, and then waiting two to five business days for that paper to be keyed in before an inspection could even be scheduled. tieBridge's requirements defined a web-architected, workflow-based platform that lets stakeholders apply, pay, and track roughly 34,000 annual transactions online.
Making vendors prove it, not pitch it
Software selection often turns on a polished sales demo. tieBridge refused to let it. Alongside the requirements and the RFP, the team authored a detailed solution-demonstration guide — scripted, scenario-by-scenario, across permitting, plan review, inspections, licensing, financials, and workflow — so every vendor performed the same real tasks in front of WSSC.
Staying to the finish
Many advisors hand off after a recommendation. tieBridge's mandate ran further: having defined the requirements, run the procurement, and evaluated the field, the team went on to lead contract negotiations and then project-manage the implementation itself, closing the gap that so often opens between what a solution was specified to do and what actually gets delivered.
Impact
- Gave WSSC an enterprise-grade requirements foundation that anchored the entire procurement and implementation.
- Structured a fair, rigorous selection: a disciplined RFP, evaluation against a single standard, and scripted vendor demonstrations that tested real task performance rather than sales polish.
- Replaced a paper-based, mainframe-era operation with one integrated, web-architected workflow platform spanning permitting, plan review, inspections, licensing, and workflow.
- Enabled online self-service for roughly 34,000 annual transactions, eliminating the in-person visit and the multi-day data-entry lag before inspections could be scheduled.
- Provided one continuous line of owner's-side expertise from requirements through contract negotiation and implementation.