How digital are you? Among chief procurement officers, 83% say digitizing the procurement process is a key priority, creating an end-to-end solution that streamlines the entire purchasing process.
With today‘s tight budgets and funding challenges, efficiency has become more crucial than ever. If you’re handling a lot of work manually or using legacy procurement software, it may be difficult to improve operations to find the edge you need. E-Procurement solutions, catalog enablement, automation, and an integrated procurement software infrastructure are key to streamlining your workflow and uncovering additional ways to reduce costs.
Modern procurement software allows you to centralize purchasing across departments and campuses. By automating much of the workflow, you bring together strategic sourcing, spend management, vendor management, and contract management into a single solution. Rather than relying on paper files, spreadsheets, or multiple software systems, everything works together in a seamless environment to simplify your procurement process and reduce the administrative burden.
Common capabilities include:
By consolidating your procurement activities, you get the gift of time. Instead of focusing on transactions and manual processes, you have the time to analyze data to find areas for improvement. Here are a few examples of how traditional procurement compares to eProcurement software solutions.
Feature | Traditional Procurement | eProcurement Software |
Approval workflows | Manual and paper-based | Automated and configurable |
Spend visibility | Limited, reactive | Real-time dashboards, proactive |
Supplier onboarding | Time-intensive | Streamlined via vendor portals |
Contract management | Decentralized files | Centralized with alerts |
Your procurement software should also allow you to work with cooperative contracts as a way to streamline further and reduce costs. Many colleges and universities find they can significantly lower their costs by adopting cooperative purchasing agreements.
Cooperative purchasing allows multiple institutions to combine their buying power in competitively solicited, pre-negotiated contracts. Instead of each campus conducting its own lengthy RFP process, members of a cooperative can purchase directly from approved suppliers with negotiated pricing and built-in compliance.
Even if you’d prefer to go it alone, tight budgets are forcing change.
“The increasing frequency of budget gaps is acting as a forcing function, compelling higher education institutions to move into the uncomfortable territory of entering into agreements to share resources to find scale.“ – Deloitte 2025 Higher Education Trends
It may be uncomfortable for some academic institutions, but already thousands of colleges and universities have embraced this change.
We often see institutions save between 10% and 15% on purchasing costs through cooperative contracts by aggregating demand across multiple colleges and universities to achieve larger volume discounts. However, bottom-line savings are just part of what makes cooperative purchasing an attractive option. You reduce the time spent on RFPs, shortening compliance reviews, and improving audit readiness at the same time.
For large systems or universities with decentralized departments, the time savings alone can translate into significant efficiency gains. Coupled with eProcurement, institutions of any size can improve cost control.
With increasing pressure to reduce procurement costs even when prices are going up, you need procurement software that enables:
When you have access to these features, you can automate much of the workflow and speed up cycle time for purchasing. Embracing automation eliminates much of the time-intensive, manual work. Organizations embracing automation are showing significant results: 43% of those surveyed said automation had reduced their manual workload by at least 25%.
With catalog enablement as part of your eProcurement platform, you can steer departments and campuses toward approved vendors, reducing maverick spending and taking advantage of negotiated contracts. Data analysis can show you where you can reduce off-contract spend, consolidate suppliers to achieve greater volume discounts, and which suppliers need more active vendor management.
These efficiency gains translate directly into budget savings.
You can also reduce your procurement costs by partnering with E&I Cooperative Services. E&I is the only nonprofit, member-owned sourcing cooperative that focuses exclusively on the education sector. This gives you access to hundreds of cooperative contracts designed for higher education and offering significant volume discounts by aggregating demand across more than 6,000 member institutions.
E&I’s Economic Benefit ModelTM (EBM) evaluates each contract to make sure you are maximizing:
With integrated procurement software, you get real-time data visibility, allowing you to track spend patterns and find innovative ways to increase strategic value. Here are some examples of how you can use data to improve your spend management.
Spend analytics can reveal purchases made outside of approved agreements. While these are often smaller dollar transactions, they can add up over time. So-called tail spend typically makes up just 20% of expenditures, but can add up to 80% of total transactions, and they typically happen outside of any centralized procurement process.
“Decentralized procurement may enable nimbler decision-making, but it introduces risk to the institution unless all areas conform to institutional guidelines and policies. “
– EDUCAUSE REVIEW
Bringing those transactions back under contract control improves compliance and can lower your costs.
By benchmarking your purchasing against available cooperative contracts, you can look for areas where you can find immediate savings.
E&I offers a no-cost Strategic Spend Assessment (SSA) for members. Data analysts will evaluate your actual spend and look for where you can move to cooperative contracts to lower costs or consolidate purchasing for better spend management.
With an eProcurement solution, you get the visibility and control needed to improve vendor management, reduce risk, and drive savings.
Through integrated dashboards, you can track pricing trends, supplier diversity, and contract management across all spend categories. The automation built into these systems also makes strategic sourcing easier and reduces overall cycle times.
For multi-campus systems, eProcurement platforms align decentralized units under shared processes and data standards.
Optimizing procurement requires four core components:
Implementing procurement software requires careful planning and a focus on change management strategies to aid adoption. Following a few best practices can help make your process go more smoothly.
Before selecting a platform, map your current procurement workflow and technology infrastructure to identify pain points such as manual approvals, inconsistent supplier data, or limited spend visibility.
You will want to bring stakeholders from finance, IT, procurement, and various departments into the process early to get a more complete picture and also improve buy-in when you make systematic changes.
You need to define what you want your software to do, such as addressing the specific pain points you’ve uncovered or improving contract utilization. Setting measurable KPIs right from the start helps you make better decisions about which procurement software to buy and accountability for achieving your biggest goals.
Integration with existing ERP, finance, and eProcurement systems is critical. Data migration can be complex to ensure all of the supplier records, budget codes, and contract data flows seamlessly. Migration is also a good time to clean up and standardize your data.
After investing time into the integration, it can be tempting to just shut off the old system and push everyone to the new procurement software. While there will be a time when that happens, it typically works best to start with a pilot program. This might begin with one department using the system or focusing on one specific purchasing category.
This gives you time to gather feedback and identify areas where you need to make changes or offer additional training.
Speaking of training, you need to make sure you provide the training tools users need to learn the system. Adoption often lags when training is ineffective.
You’ll also want to communicate the benefits, not just for the institution but for the users. Explaining how the new system will save time and ensure compliance can help improve adoption rates.
With any software use, the go-live data is just the beginning. You’ll want to track your performance against the original goals you set up and look for areas that need improvement.
“If you’re fully embracing the [continuous improvement] CI mindset, the work is never finished,” said Steve Swinney, CEO of Kodiak Building Partners. “Each improvement should fuel new questions and inspire the next round of optimization, creating a self-sustaining cycle of progress.”
Regardless of the goals you set, you will want to track KPIs that align with your institutional goals and cost management strategies. Some of the more common KPIs include:
You can set up dashboards in your procurement software to automate tracking and measure ROI.
Joining a cooperative is a straightforward way to access competitively solicited contracts designed for higher education.
E&I Cooperative Services membership is free for qualifying institutions and carries no minimum purchasing obligation. Members gain access to hundreds of ready-to-use contracts, covering every major category from technology and facilities to travel, furniture, and scientific supplies. Looking for eProcurement solutions, catalog enablement, or help with integration? You can find cooperative agreements covering nearly anything your institution needs.
You also benefit from incentives in contracts and patronage refunds based on your annual spending.
E&I Cooperative Services provides the tools and expertise to help you streamline your procurement process and strengthen financial performance.
What are the benefits of eProcurement?
E-Procurement platforms simplify purchasing, automate approvals, and provide real-time visibility into spending. They reduce administrative workload, ensure compliance, and produce the data you need for consistent improvement.
How do I streamline the procurement process?
Use digital procurement software to automate approvals and integrate cooperative contracts for faster, compliant purchases. Centralizing workflows and eliminating manual steps improves accuracy and efficiency.
How does procurement software work?
Procurement software automates each stage of the purchasing process and tracks suppliers, contracts, and budgets in a single system.
How do I control spending in procurement?
You can control spending by adding spend management dashboards, consolidating suppliers, and bringing off-contract purchases under approved agreements. Using cooperative contracts and analytics tools can also help you reduce unnecessary costs.
83% of CPOs prioritize digital procurement, but manual processes still dominate higher ed. Discover how E&I’s eProcurement platform combines automation with cooperative buying power to deliver 10-15% cost savings.