In an era of constrained budgets, higher education procurement leaders are seeking sustainable cost savings through more strategic approaches to sourcing goods and services. At the same time, technological innovations offer new opportunities to improve operating efficiencies—further reducing administrative costs while improving vendor and customer satisfaction.
But the transition to more strategic, technology-enhanced procurement units has been difficult. Most units have historically been staffed and organized to support transactional activities, like processing requisitions and invoices. Accordingly, they are not staffed to perform more strategic tasks, like spend analytics and competitive contract negotiation and management.
This resource is part of The Essential Guide to Cost Containment Strategies for Higher Education. Access this guide for 500+ critical tactics for immediate and long-term cost savings.
This toolkit is designed to help procurement leaders execute on strategic goals in four focus areas:
- Create staff capacity for analytical work through process improvement
- Collect and monitor performance metrics to advance strategic goals
- Create new roles and hire staff with elevated skill sets to expand strategic capabilities
- Communicate policies and processes with campus stakeholders to get buy-in for necessary changes.
Process automation and redesign tools
Use this tool to sequence investments in automation technology and other process improvement efforts. Procurement leaders should leverage technology and process redesign to maximize operating efficiencies and create staff capacity for strategic activities. However, leaders oversee a variety of processes that may benefit from technology enhancement or redesign. This tool provides a more systematic way to pinpoint the improvements that will yield the highest returns on investment and determine the ideal order of implementation.
Use this tool to identify the most strategically relevant performance metrics to monitor in your unit. Procurement leaders have access to an extensive amount of performance data. To effectively leverage this data to drive strategic improvements, they must first select a handful of core metrics that best reflect their specific unit performance goals. This tool provides a starting list of performance metrics to choose from, as well as a filtering process to narrow that list down to those metrics that best evaluate a unit’s operational effectiveness.
Use this compendium to revise procurement position descriptions when current staff members vacate their roles. Leaders should also review the descriptions of new roles other institutions have created and consider the need and ability to introduce similar positions in their units.
Use this toolkit to design roles and policies to better integrate procurement and IT on campus. Procurement and IT leaders alike are recognizing increasing purchasing risks as distributed campus buyers enter into more technology contracts and purchase more tech-embedded commodities. In response, leaders should use this tool to evaluate the need to better integrate the IT and procurement functions through a dedicated IT contract reviewer role. Whether or not leaders determine to invest in new roles, they should review the additional resources in the toolkit to improve contract turnaround processes and introduce other policies to reduce IT purchasing risks.
Use this tool to update existing interview practices to assess professional competencies when backfilling roles and/or hiring staff into new roles. Procurement staff increasingly need strong professional competencies such as communication, conflict management, and customer service to succeed in strategic roles. This tool provides both a menu of sample competencies for which leaders can screen in interview processes and questions to use to evaluate candidates’ strength in selected competencies.
Use this audit to improve the customer friendliness of procurement unit websites. Strategic activities such as analyzing spend data and automating inefficient workflows often yield new purchasing policies and processes. Unitbased customers must understand and comply with these policies or processes to effectively advance strategic goals. This tool helps leaders ensure that their unit websites—customers’ most commonly referenced source for procurement information—document critical information in a customer-friendly format.