How Bubble Optimizes Procurement for the City of Atlanta

This Showcase Project also appears on Bubble.io

Government services aren’t often renowned for their speed and efficiency. But when Justin Cullifer, co-founder of Atlanta-based consulting group APG Emerging Tech (APGET), and Lucas Bennington, founder of Bubble agency Codi Technologies, met at BubbleCon in October 2023, they quickly recognized there was an opportunity to change that.

Justin had been working with the City of Atlanta’s Department of Procurement for the past year, brainstorming ways to update and streamline their very manual operations. Come late November 2023 — one month after BubbleCon — and the teams were hard at work developing their first Bubble app for the city. By early January 2024, it was officially live.

Today, Lucas and Justin’s partnership with the city has bloomed beyond procurement optimizations to accomplish additional workflow orchestration, a 50% cost savings relative to traditional coding, and licensing opportunities for other cities around the country.

Building a solution to support “billions” of spend

Think of Atlanta’s Department of Procurement as the conveyor belt for how the city sources and purchases goods and services for organizations like the international airport, police department, and public works. “Billions of dollars and spend every year go through this department,” Justin says.

“Bubble came into the picture when we decided to introduce workflow automation and build a much better user interface."

From the beginning of the city’s partnership with APGET, everyone knew that the city would benefit from modernizing their procurement platform. “Historically, they've relied upon phone calls, emails, and a number of different manual methods for keeping track of procurement requests,” explains Justin. “It makes things very, very challenging.”

The city’s system of record was — and remains — an Oracle database. “Bubble came into the picture when we decided to introduce workflow automation and build a much better user interface,” says Justin.

So APGET and Codi Technologies partnered to use Bubble to accommodate the city’s needs. The teams started planning in mid-November 2023, began development the last week in November, and deployed phase one — an app called GovAutomations Procurement — to production the first week in January 2024.

Bubble shines as a “terrific candidate” for the frontend refresh

“GovAutomations Procurement is a portal that facilitates two things: First, suppliers can request a meeting with the Department of Procurement and explain who they are, what they do, and why they want to meet,” explains Justin. “And second, external companies can invite the Department of Procurement to attend and speak at their events. We built a gateway to bridge those introductions. After all, municipalities win when they have more qualified suppliers engaged with them and bidding on their projects.”