• Built the ATCOM procurement application in less than two months.

• Taught other state government agencies and organizations how to build their own apps.

• ATCOM could be a model for other state governments in Latin America.

The new government of Tamaulipas, headed by Governor Dr. Américo Villarreal Anaya, established the State Development Plan for 2023–2028. The government’s mission is to serve the population of Tamaulipas with public policies that guarantee equal opportunities, promoting humanistic and supportive inclusion, so that everyone can benefit from improvements in wellbeing, social development, and sustainable economic progress. The new administration aims to be distinguished by its efficient work, truth, honesty, and justice.

The Tamaulipas state government is large, encompassing 17 ministries and 54 decentralized agencies known as Decentralized Public Organizations (DPOs). The state government's 60,000 employees serve around 3.5 million inhabitants.

The state government bears the responsibility for guaranteeing citizens' basic rights, providing public education, ensuring security, maintaining and building infrastructure, delivering healthcare services, enforcing laws, and promoting economic development alongside environmental protection. These essential functions form the core pillars of government: service to the people, a social policy focused on well-being, and inclusive, sustainable economic progress.

The Government of Tamaulipas seeks to transform itself to become a digital government. It is starting from within, training servers and modernizing its tools and services, as well as migrating from traditional solutions to more flexible and advanced options.

When it took office, the new administration identified the need to promote more efficient and fluid collaboration between public servants by allowing sharing and working in real time on documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. Likewise, it was crucial to have a platform that facilitated communication and coordination between team members within the organization, as well as with citizens.

From the beginning of the administration, the digital government strategy considered implementing AppSheet to digitize processes and procedures within the government and make the work of public servants more efficient.

The new administration has the responsibility of digitizing the entire state government. The Secretary of Administration, Dr. Jesús Lavín Verástegui, who already had extensive experience in government administration, saw in this initiative an opportunity to improve the administrative processes of the state government.

“We will do everything in our power to improve public management through innovation and technology. We are going to change paradigms and expand horizons toward a digital government that benefits the people of Tamaulipas,” declares Dr. Lavín Verástegui.

After Governor Américo Villarreal took office in 2022, his team at the Secretariat of Administration also saw that purchasing processes were inefficient and opaque. His team needed to take immediate action in accordance with the values ​​of the new administration: truthfulness, justice, and transparency.

The new administration noticed problems with existing contract preparation and review processes.

When a purchase or purchase request was made, there was no automatic review process. Data was manually entered into spreadsheets, and there was no way to track who had entered the information. Therefore, when there was an error in the review process, no one could determine where the error came from. With more than 66 types of contracts that the government had to review, this manual process left a wide margin for error.

The Government of Tamaulipas evaluated several software tools to create a new purchasing solution. Since the government was using Google Workspace, they were aware of AppSheet, its integration capabilities, and key features. After completing the review of available software, the government decided that AppSheet would be an ideal solution for creating a new procurement app. This application would be called Administración Tecnológica de Compras (ATCOM).

“We have to seek to be at the forefront with the development of technologies that allow simplicity, flexibility, and innovation in government. When there are tools like Google AppSheet, they promote the path toward a disruptive digital government,” says Omar Coronado, Undersecretary of Innovation and Technologies of the Government of Tamaulipas.

The Secretariat of Administration — with the Undersecretariat of Technologies, Google and Xertica (the number one Google Cloud partner in Latin America) — coordinated specialized consultancies on AppSheet issues to collaborate in the process of creating the application.

“The support provided by Google and Xertica has been fundamental throughout the process. Users have had good acceptance of the Google Workspace platform thanks to key training. This change is promoting digital culture within the government, and it will help us achieve the social innovation that Governor Dr. Américo Villarreal Anaya has outlined,” states Miguel Alpízar, Director of User Services in the Government of Tamaulipas.

An application like ATCOM would have taken six months to a year to develop in the traditional way. With AppSheet, the team was able to develop and implement ATCOM in less than two months.

ATCOM was designed to centralize information that had been stored in other parts of the state government, as well as other relevant organizations. This helps government employees quickly vet potential suppliers and prevent conflicts of interest from arising before a purchase is approved.

The application integrates different databases and compares information from contracts, suppliers, and other sources of information, such as lists of companies observed by the Servicio de Administración Tributaria (SAT), which is the revenue service of the Mexican federal government.

Now, when the Government of Tamaulipas registers a supplier, it can check the records and location of the company to determine whether it complies with current regulations.

Administrative employees can use ATCOM on their mobile devices and office computers, seamlessly transitioning between them when needed. ATCOM is used daily to prepare contracts, consult with suppliers, and perform other essential purchasing-related tasks.

With ATCOM, the Government of Tamaulipas has ensured that its new purchasing processes are more efficient, streamlining collaboration among government employees and reducing the time needed to gather all the information to review contracts. Originally, one worker had the dates, another worker had the suppliers, and a third worker had the contract list. It would have taken multiple employees a week to collect all the necessary information.

Because AppSheet is cost-effective, it’s well suited for future digitization efforts at the state government level. In this sense, AppSheet is perfectly suited to public initiatives. Since achieving these improvements with ATCOM, the Government of Tamaulipas has created other applications using the no-code capabilities available in AppSheet.

“The implementation of AppSheet will allow us to reduce response times to emerging system needs within the state government, enabling us to automate activities, innovate digital processes, reduce human error, and provide a better service to the people of Tamaulipas,” says Daniel González, General Director of Digital Government in the Government of Tamaulipas.

Other state government agencies are already operating their own AppSheet projects, and the Secretary of Administration is providing them with training. Ultimately, ATCOM could even serve as a model for state governments in Mexico and possibly Latin America as well, because they typically employ similar procurement processes.

As Governor Dr. Américo Villarreal Anaya set out in his State Development Plan 2023-2028, "In this new administration, we strive to reach the democratization of technology and the spirit of innovation among public employees, supporting the digitization of government to provide a full range of services for citizens. Therefore, it is imperative to use new emerging technologies that allow us to achieve our objectives of a Digital Government maximizing our resources.”