NYS HCR — modernizing supplier diversity portfolio management across the State's affordable housing program.

A five‑year partnership, extended in open competition.

New York State Homes & Community Renewal (HCR) finances and oversees one of the country's largest affordable‑housing programs, working through seven affiliates — HFA, HFTC, SONYMA, AHC, MBBA, TSFC, and the central agency itself — and a constantly active portfolio of multi‑family construction. The Division of Equal Opportunity & Compliance (DECO) is the team responsible for ensuring that this portfolio meets New York's MWBE, SDVOB, and EEO Workforce obligations under Executive Law Articles 15‑A and 3.

AXI has supported DECO since 2021 under HFA Goal Setting Software contract #3386, providing goal setting, search, outreach, and waiver management for the HCR portfolio. In late 2025 HCR issued a new RFP to expand the engagement into full supplier diversity portfolio management — contract management, utilization reporting, compliance monitoring, workforce reporting, and impact reporting on top of the existing scope. AXI was awarded the contract in the Spring of 2026.

This case study describes what AXI delivers to HCR — framed by the platform features and execution services that constitute AXI's standard offering. Every capability described here is available to any AXI client; the work in a new engagement is configuration, not custom development.

From a legacy portal workflow to a unified DECO workspace.

The supplier diversity workflow most authorities inherit is the same shape across the country: a legacy portal originally designed for federal DBE reporting, retrofitted for state MWBE programs, with the rest of the work happening offline in spreadsheets, email threads, and shared drives. The pattern is familiar — and it is what AXI's deployment at HCR replaces.

The modernization is end‑to‑end. Every phase of the DECO contract — from goal setting through close‑out — runs in the same workspace, against the same source data, with the same record format. Developers and prime contractors work in the same system as DECO staff; subcontractors affirm payments in the same system that issued the utilization report. Reporting against the portfolio runs on live records, not on data re‑keyed after the fact.

Twelve capabilities — the platform DECO actually runs on.

Each card below names a capability described in the HCR RFP and now in production on the HCR platform. Every capability is part of AXI's standard offering — the configuration is what is tuned to DECO's process.

Built around HCR's process — not a generic compliance portal.

The reason HCR ran a competitive procurement and selected AXI over the incumbent national portal is not a feature checkbox. It is the design philosophy: AXI treats each client's process as the design surface. DECO doesn't run the program the way DASNY runs the program, which isn't how SUNY Binghamton runs it, which isn't how Skanska runs it. The platform and the services adapt to that. Goal logic, search defaults, outreach cadence, message templates, report formats, button labels, color schema, the dashboards that load on sign‑in — all configurable.

That is the difference HCR's procurement evaluated against B2GNow and six other vendors. The result: AXI was awarded the contract.

A fixed monthly charge — predictable, all‑inclusive, easy to budget.

HCR's engagement, like every AXI enterprise engagement, is structured as a fixed monthly charge set at the start of the term and held flat through it. The monthly figure covers the full capability set — platform license, configuration, execution services, hosting and back‑end maintenance, training, and reporting — with no per‑user, per‑project, per‑message, or per‑waiver billing layered on top.

The practical effect for a state agency budget cycle is what matters: a budget line that does not move when the portfolio grows, when a busy quarter doubles outreach volume, when DECO adds an affiliate's projects mid‑term, or when a new report is needed on short notice. That predictability is what makes AXI easy to extend, easy to defend in budget review, and easy to forecast against multi‑year capital plans.

Turnkey — first quarterly reporting window in 90 days.

The HCR deployment is structured to land in time for the Q1 reporting window that opens July 1, 2026. The full data migration of active projects, contracts, and existing utilization / workforce plans is included — no separate implementation invoice. AXI's standard delivery timeline:

The AXI team supporting HCR

Six full‑time NYS compliance and technology specialists are dedicated to the HCR engagement — three focused on DECO and contractor support and execution services, three on platform development, testing, and maintenance. The same team has worked on HCR's goal setting, GFE, and waiver platform since 2021. Onboarding and quarterly‑reporting peaks are anticipated workloads, not surprises.

RFP requirements — coverage summary.

For reference, the requirement categories from HCR's 2025 Supplier Diversity Compliance Solution RFP that the AXI platform covers under the enterprise license. Each is in production today or scheduled within the 90‑day delivery window.