CLEARBOX SOURCE CASE STUDY
City of Mesa Streamlines Capital Planning with Marketplace.city
Through the Clearbox Source solution, the City of Mesa evaluated 28 software solutions for capital asset management, narrowing to 1 final selection.
Today, 30–35 users across departments use Source for vendor intelligence, built into standard operating procedures, with seamless city council approval.
AT-A-GLANCE
- Location: Mesa, AZ
- Government Type: Municipality
- Population: ~533,000
- Buyer: Mesa Dept. of Innovation and Technology, Parks & Recreation and Facilities Management
- Key parties: Marketplace.city, City of Mesa
THE CHALLENGE
Modernizing Capital Planning Across Departments
The City of Mesa's Parks & Recreation and Facilities Management departments were each managing capital asset planning using spreadsheets containing tens of thousands of rows of data. The complexity and scale of this approach made it extremely difficult to prioritize investments, align across departments, and make informed decisions about aging infrastructure.
Without a centralized, technology-driven solution, the departments needed to identify the right capital planning software—but lacked the internal capacity to efficiently evaluate the market on their own.
THE SOLUTION
From 28 Vendors to a Clear Winner
To move quickly and comprehensively, the City engaged Marketplace.city to launch a targeted Clearbox procurement process. Leveraging Marketplace.city's standardized data structure and broad vendor network, Mesa was able to reach a wide spectrum of capital planning software providers—28 vendors in total—while ensuring a fair and structured evaluation.
Marketplace.city aggregates and structures vendor data in a consistent format, enabling the City to efficiently filter from 28 vendors down to 8, then to 2 finalists for deep-dive evaluation. Mesa held demos, and a clear winner emerged.
The entire process tooks weeks not months, a pace and quality the City could not have achieved on its own.
“We got to a point from 28 solutions—that we could never ever do a demo with—to two that very strongly met our needs. We went from 28 down to two, we held demos, one was fantastic, and from that there was a clear winner that we were able to walk through and get approval for. I don’t think we could have reached this point in either the pace or the quality of what we did through your solution without Marketplace.city.” - Sam McKenna, City of Mesa
THE OUTCOME
Built Into Operations—With Council Approval in Hand
With a vendor selected with the help of Clearbox Source, the City of Mesa moved quickly to implementation. Today, 30–35 users across multiple departments actively use the platform for vendor intelligence and market research.
The solution has been fully integrated into the City's standard operating procedures, ensuring consistent and data-driven technology sourcing and procurement across departments. When it came time to present to the city council, the process was seamless—the structured, defensible evaluation made approval straightforward.
The Source approach with Marketplace.city allowed Mesa to accomplish in weeks what would have taken months or years through a traditional procurement process.