An airport, four marine terminals, and the systems running underneath them.
The Port of Portland operates PDX, ranked Travel + Leisure's #2 airport of 2025 and named one of the World's Most Beautiful by Condé Nast Traveler and Prix Versailles, along with four marine terminals and a regional real-estate portfolio. In 2024, they hired Avèro to rebuild the enterprise systems running underneath all of it.
The Port of Portland isn't one business. It's three. An airport authority, a marine operator, and a regional real-estate holding company, all running on the same creaking back-office stack.
The public authority operates Portland International Airport, four marine terminals along the Columbia River, and a regional real-estate portfolio. Three operating models. Three sets of regulatory obligations. Three sets of financial reporting cadences. One back-office stack running JD Edwards and Avantis EAM, bolted together over two decades and showing it.
Finance, HR, procurement, asset management, property and lease administration, capital projects. Every one of those functions was living in systems that couldn't talk to each other cleanly. Leadership couldn't get a single view of the operation without manual reconciliation. Staff couldn't make decisions without data that was stale by the time it surfaced.
In August 2024, leadership hired Avèro to do what a vendor can't. Sit on the Port's side of the table through the full lifecycle. Assess what's there. Define what success looks like. Build a procurement that stays honest. Negotiate a contract that doesn't leak. Then stay on for implementation oversight.
What the work has produced so far.
A sequenced program from readiness assessment through active vendor negotiation. Each deliverable feeds the next and leaves the Port in a stronger buying position than it started.
Readiness assessment
A full audit of what the Port is running today. JD Edwards, Avantis EAM, every satellite system and manual workaround documented. The baseline nobody had in one place.
Future-state vision
What the enterprise looks like when the back office stops being the bottleneck. Integrated finance, HR, procurement, asset management, property administration, and capital projects. One source of truth across three operating models.
ERP strategy roadmap
A sequenced modernization plan with finance first, then HR and procurement, then asset management and property, then capital projects. Dependencies mapped, risks surfaced, decisions timed to the Port's budget cycle.
RFP development
Procurement-ready specification built on the readiness findings and the Port's requirements traceability matrix. Scenario-based evaluation criteria, not checkbox feature lists. Demos that answer the Port's questions, not the vendor's script.
Change-management playbooks
Role-specific adoption plans across every affected department. Leadership alignment. Stakeholder mapping. The work that prevents implementations from stalling six months in.
Contract-negotiation framework
A structured approach to contract terms, milestone-based payments, AI provisions, and the no-cost concessions most buyers miss. Built on forty-plus engagements of pattern recognition, ready for vendor negotiation.
RFP development & issuance
Requirements traceability matrix translated into a scenario-based RFP that asked vendors to demonstrate the Port's actual processes, not generic feature checklists. Published to the market and managed through the response period.
Proposal evaluation
Seventeen proposals received. Avèro led the evaluation team through structured scoring: concrete commitments versus vague language, vendor-specific capability gaps, implementation track records. The funnel narrowed to four finalists on merit, not persuasion.
Finalist demos
Four days of scenario-based vendor demonstrations using the Port's actual data and business scenarios, not vendor-scripted showcases. Avèro managed the demos and scored each against pre-agreed criteria with the evaluation team.
Start at Zero. Then run the playbook.
Every Avèro engagement runs the same six-step methodology. At the Port of Portland: Discover, Require, and Evaluate are complete. Contract is in flight. The Port has chosen its vendor and Avèro is now negotiating the agreement. Govern and Operate come next.
Discovery
Current state, honest constraints, political temperature.
Requirements
What success looks like in language you can defend.
Evaluation
Demos that answer your questions, not their script.
Contract
Every clause read against what we've negotiated before.
Governance
Buyer-side PMO. IV&V. The oversight the agency needs.
Operate
Knowledge transfer. Benefits realization. The handoff.
Contract close. Then implementation oversight.
The Port has chosen its vendor. Avèro is now at the table negotiating the agreement. Payment structure, milestone triggers, IP terms, exit provisions, AI provisions, no-cost concessions. Every clause read against what we have negotiated before across forty-plus public-sector engagements.
Contract close is where procurement turns into program. The vendor's incentive shifts from winning the deal to delivering the work. The Port's incentive shifts from selection to execution. The quality of the agreement at this moment determines how the rest of the program runs.
The day the contract is executed, implementation oversight starts. Buyer-side PMO. Independent verification. Change management running parallel to technical configuration. The advisor who ran the selection stays on through go-live.
Others who hired us for similar work.
Different verticals, same buyer-side advisory. Each link opens a case study.
Los Angeles World Airports
A larger aviation authority running an equally ambitious ERP modernization on the buyer's side of the table.
City of Knoxville
Same independent buyer-side model, applied at the city scale on permitting and process reform.
Clackamas County
Buyer-side PMO through assessment and taxation software replacement, coordinated across three Oregon counties.
Running something similar? Let's talk.
Thirty minutes. No pitch. If Avèro isn't the right fit, we'll tell you who is.