Publication Policy: Data User Guide

Invitation to use Portland’s OCDS publication

Portland’s OCDS publication may be intimidating to you, perhaps because you don’t consider yourself a “data person.” This is a myth. You are a data person. We are all data people because data tells our stories - about what we value, what happened, what will happen, and what we should do about it. Being a “data person” only takes curiosity and the courage to ask questions. You may also think that city procurements and contracts are irrelevant to the pressing and routine issues that you care about in Portland. This too is a myth. Public procurements and contracts are essential to the public goods and services that we rely on everyday such as clean drinking water, safe streets, waste management, access to nature and greenspaces, programs for youth, and emergency management.

The use of Portland’s Open Contracting Data Standard publication will make Portland’s procurements and contracts better, making our public goods and services better. Better procurements could mean being faster, simpler, and more transparent with cost savings and cost recovery. Better could mean contract opportunity forecasting for the next five years for small and large businesses. Better could mean supporting small- and medium-sized suppliers to fairly compete for contracts, deliver improved value and services for residents, and grow their business. 

Explore Portland’s Open Contracting Data Standard publication to “read” our stories; to learn whether our spending in contracts match the city goods and services essential to our family, friends, and neighbors and us; and to drive the vision of how we will make Portland’s procurements and contracts, and thus, Portland, better. 

Getting Started

Are you new to the Open Contracting Data Standard? Reading the Primer will familiarize you with key concepts behind OCDS.   

Purpose of Publication 

The City of Portland’s Open Contracting Data Standard publication makes information on City procurements and contracts accessible online and in open formats so it can be used, reused, and redistributed by any interested party.

Publication details

Creation of OCDS datasets

View full size image of Extract, transform, load

First, the City of Portland provides raw data from Buyspeed, SAP, and B2G, and stores it in HCP Anywhere. Second, the normalization procedure converts the raw data into a structured format that is readable by the system. Third, the data converts from normalized data to the standardized OCDS format (version 1.1), using the internal mappings. When the conversion step completes, the system indexes the result for search and download. Finally, the system filters, removes duplicates, compiles, and publishes the final OCDS data. Bulk downloads on the City of Portland’s OCDS Publication page updates every two weeks due to a highly time-consuming conversion process. The City also updates the raw data on the same two-week schedule. 

OCID generation

Open Contracting ID (ocid) is a globally unique identifier used to join data in all stages of the contracting process. Ocid consists of a prefix and an identifier. Portland’s publication uses ocds-ptecst as the prefix, and REQ_NBR from BuySpeed or Purchasing Document from SAP as the identifier. The use of REQ_NBR or Purchasing Document for the ocid depends on whether City employees initiated the procurement in BuySpeed or SAP. Typically, BuySpeed, the City’s electronic procurement portal, does not record small direct procurements (i.e., Distributed Purchase Orders or DPOs) and some intermediate direct procurements (i.e. Purchase Orders or POs) because bureaus initiate those procurements with little to no participation from Procurement Services. Portland registered the ocds-ptecst prefix on 2024-02-13.

OCDS Release peculiarities

View full size image of Image showing that each time a new release is published it is added to the index, the compiled release is updated with the latest values, and the versioned release is updated with any new changes.

(Source: How is OCDS data published?)

Portland’s OCDS releases disclose data about the following:

• Tender: the activities undertaken to enter a contract. In the United States, we often refer to tender as the solicitation or bidding activities such as a Request for Proposals (RFP).
• Award: award for the given procurement. More than one award per contracting process is possible.
• Contract: information regarding the signed contract between City and the supplier(s).
• Implementation: implementation information of the contract in accordance with the obligations specified in that contract.  

Portland captures procurement data in three centralized systems: BuySpeed (electronic procurement portal), SAP (enterprise resource planning software), and B2G (contract compliance software), managed by Procurement Services. Some bureaus also use supplemental systems like Airtable to record additional information not in BuySpeed, SAP, or B2G. Each system shares details on different contract stages that do not synchronize. As Portland’s OCDS usage matures, we expect to map additional supplemental data from more bureaus such as budget (planning) and project management (implementation).

Every two weeks, a data analyst in Procurement Services extracts reports in Excel (.xlsx) and uploads them to HCP Anywhere. Published releases can differ depending on the presence or not of procurement data in all the source systems listed above. Currently, those reports include:

1. BuySpeed “Projects” report
2. BuySpeed “Quotes per Bid” report
3. SAP “Contract Listing Report”
4. SAP “Purchase Orders Listing Report”
5. B2G “Contract Status Report”

Although Portland attempts to publish data in the best quality, data quality issues remain as we introduce and implement quality data controls. In the interest of operational transparency, Portland chooses to publish data with poor quality with the goal of improving data quality over time. If users find errors in the data, please share details on the error reporting form. For more information on our data cleanup efforts, view our data cleanup reports and track our progress. 

Processes and Stages Covered

Releases contain information on open, selective, limited and direct procurement procedures since April 29, 2015 and current ongoing procedures. Recently, as part of the Transition Project, Portland adopted new procurement policies, Public Contracting Rules, in March 2025 that became retroactively effective January 1, 2025. Portland’s OCDS release mapped local data to OCDS under previous procurement policies and rules prior to January 1, 2025. Portland’s OCDS publication will reflect these changes in future updates. For reference, the threshold before the new policies became effective are noted below.

Open: competitive procurement procedures that result in an outline agreement

Selective: procurement procedures that share all the same features as Open, but also have additional technical, economic or suitability selection criteria to enable the participation in the tender or solicitation process.

Limited: limited competitive procurement procedures that result in an outline agreement or a purchase order (PO) 

Direct: non-competitive procurement procedures that results in a distributed purchase order (DPO) or an outline agreement

Date Fields

All dates are presented in Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) or Pacific Standard Time (PST) fully corresponding to the source data. Final release dates will have a “-7” or “-8” suffix depending if Daylight Savings Time (DST) is in effect on the specific date. 

If the source date does not have time indicated, then it is reported as midnight of the given date. Typical date-only value would then look like:

• 1/1/2018 > 2018-01-01T00:00:00-8
• 6/1/2018 > 2018-06-01T00:00:00-7

Parties

The party object with Buyer, Procuring Entity and Payer roles represents a bureau at the City of Portland that initiated the procurement. The party that has Tenderer, Supplier and Payee roles is the winner of the tender. This is the company that signed a contract with the City of Portland.

Subcontractors are third parties that perform part of a contract on behalf of a supplier. We only list subcontractors that have specific certifications, e.g. Emerging Small Business. Data on subcontractors come from B2G, which only captures subcontractors for Construction and Professional, Technical, Expert (PTE) services contracts. See our developing use case to include subcontractors for Goods and Services contracts. 

Parties ID

For the parties with roles Buyer, Procuring Entity and Payer we used the standard approach that says to combine {parties/identifier/scheme} and {parties/identifier/id}.

But for the parties with Tenderer, Supplier and Payee roles we form the ID using {parties/additionalIdentifiers/id} and {parties/additionalIdentifiers/scheme} as it is the BuySpeed data that appears earlier than data from other systems.

Section Criteria 

Users may encounter several selection criteria types in the published release:

• Technical criterion means that the vendors must be prequalified in certain areas of work in order to submit a proposal. Please see the City of Portland's prequalification requirements for more info.
• Economic criterion means that vendors should be capable to execute a contract of a specified amount within certain areas of work listed in the technical criterion.
• Suitability criterion warns that only vendors in the Prime Contractor Development Program may bid, and the contract opportunity is not publicly shared.

Contract Items

Information on contract items is provided gradually as the contract purchase orders are created during the contract implementation phase. These are parts of the contract that are performed separately, each having its own scope, value and timeframes. 

One contract can have multiple purchase orders, and each purchase order can bring information about several items. Currently, the City does not consistently document information about contract items, which is an issue that we hope to address. See our developing use case to consistently document information about contract items. 

Contract Milestones

Contract milestones are used to keep track of the contract approval and represent several authorities that should sign off on the contract before it can be considered as finalized. Each finalized contract should have 2 or 4 sign-offs:

• Contract Administrator and City Auditor’s approval
• Contract Administrator, City Attorney, Purchasing Agent and City Auditor’s approval

Each authority's approval will result in one contract milestone.

Only achieved signoffs are published in the release. Information on the upcoming signoffs is not disclosed.

Recently, as part of the Transition Project, Portland adopted new procurement policies, Public Contracting Rules, in March 2025 that became retroactively effective January 1, 2025. As a result, Portland added additional milestones. Portland’s OCDS publication will reflect these changes in future updates. 

Contract Agreed Metrics

Portland uses agreed metrics in the releases to report about certified prime and subcontractors that took part in the contract implementation. Each agreed metric object represents a specific certification (e.g. DBE that stands for Disadvantaged Business Enterprise) and reports the corresponding amount for that certification under said contract.  

In statistics, an observation is one occurrence of something being measured. Each agreed metric contains one or multiple observations. Each observation has value, which represents payments and dimensions that reference the prime contractor or subcontractor that hold this certification and performed some work within this contract. Note that the City of Portland counts certification towards our goals at the time of award, and the agreed metrics counts the payments. 

Below we provide an illustration, and we use “companyName” to mask the business names in the example. 

Currently agreed metrics pull from B2G data, which is limited to Professional, Technical, Expert services and Construction contracts. See our developing use case to expand agreed metrics to Goods and Services contracts.

Contract Implementation Transactions

Transactions represent all the payments that were performed within the contract’s purchase orders. Each transaction value is equal to the value of the purchase order item, thus transactions in the published release can be more granular than the actual bank transactions. For example, the City may issue one bank transaction or payment for six purchase order items. 

Contract Implementation Milestones

Users can find two types of milestones in the published release. 1) Payment milestones forms from contract purchase orders and 2) delivery milestones from task orders. Differentiate payment and delivery milestones by the prefixes PO- and TO-.

Contract Implementation Metrics 

Portland uses contract implementation metrics in the releases to report about certified prime and subcontractors that took part in the contract task order implementation. Each metric object represents a specific certification (e.g. DBE that stands for Disadvantaged Business Enterprise) and reports the corresponding amount for that certification under said contract.

Each agreed metric contains one or multiple observations. Each observation has value, which represents payments and dimensions that reference the prime contractor or subcontractor that hold this certification and performed some work within this contract.

Contract implementation metrics may disclose information coming from B2G or from supplemental reporting systems such as Airtable.

Task Orders

Task orders, a custom extension object that is very similar to the structure of purchase orders, have their own ID, title, and status; link to purchase order; execution period; and value. Currently, task order data in the dataset only comes from one bureau, who provided Procurement Services access to their data early in Portland’s OCDS project. Other bureaus who wish to include their task order data in the dataset should contact Procurement Services to map their data onto the same data schema. See our developing use case to include more task orders into Portland’s OCDS dataset. 

Accessing the data

OCDS data

The City of Portland makes OCDS data available in the following formats to meet the needs of different users. 

Data scope

Codes, codelists, and extensions used in the data publication

The data includes the following additional fields:

The data includes the following additional codelist values:

List of extensions

License

The City of Portland publishes the data included in the OCDS under the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL 1.0). This open license ensures compliance with the Open Definition and grants users the right to:

• Use this data for any purpose, including both commercial and non-commercial use;
• Create and publish new content or analyses based on this data;
• Re-publish the data, on the condition that any link to the original source remains intact; and
• Exercise all other permissions outlined in the full license text.

By adopting an open license, we encourage transparency, collaboration, and innovation. We recommend that users refer to the PDDL 1.0 license for complete details on permitted uses, and we encourage linking to this license in all related data portals and documentation to ensure clarity around the data’s reuse rights.[3] 

Additional documentation

This section provides links to some additional documentation:         

• A link to the OCDS standard documentation
• Additional source data dictionary developed to support the publication: 

Disclaimer

Access to the City of Portland’s Open Contracting Data Standard publication, does not imply that the City of Portland, has verified the veracity, accuracy, adequacy, suitability, completeness and timeliness of the information provided through our site. Procurement data provided by the City of Portland includes data from Vendors. The City of Portland cannot guarantee that data provided by the different entities contributing to OCDS data is kept up to date. The information contained in the documents accompanying the procurement process are digitalizations of the documents. Any publication constitutes a faithful and complete compilation of the document issued by the official entity, without additions, deletions or corrections of any nature. The City of Portland is not responsible for the decisions taken from the information disseminated in the City of Portland’s Open Contracting Data Standard publication or for possible damages caused to the visiting user or to third parties due to actions that are based solely on the information obtained on the site. The City of Portland may carry out, at any time and without prior notice, modifications and updates on the information contained in the City of Portland’s Open Contracting Data Standard publication or its configuration or presentation.

Appendix - Data dictionary 

* “+ Dictionary” means that the source value was transformed into more verbose one with the help of 

** “+Codelist mapping” means that the source value was mapped to the equivalent OCDS value with the help of OCDS - Codelist Mapping Template for OCDS 1.1.5 (Template Version 0.2) #Portland. 

Undefined Mapping

Outline Agreement Mapping

BuySpeed+PO Mapping

PO Mapping