The Complete Guide to Strategic Procurement: Solutions, Planning, and Best Practices

We’ve entered unprecedented territory. According to Deloitte, two-thirds of higher education finance professionals believe the current business model will become unsustainable over the next 5 to 10 years. Despite best efforts, there are challenges to the status quo, requiring a more serious look at spending and planning.

It’s not theoretical, and some academic institutions aren’t going to make it. More than 80 public or nonprofit colleges have closed, merged, or announced plans to do so since 2020. And nearly every institution has had cutbacks. More than 70% of colleges and universities have made expense reductions across nearly all areas of their operations.

Finance and procurement leaders know this reality all too well, which is why strategic procurement has become more important than ever. Procurement efforts have become critical drivers in reducing costs and delivering value, with measurable goals that help solve short-term financial challenges and align with long-term institutional priorities.

What Is Strategic Procurement?

At its core, strategic procurement is a long-term, holistic approach to sourcing that goes beyond buying what’s needed today at the lowest cost.  It emphasizes aligning procurement decisions with institutional objectives, such as sustainability, student experience, and risk management.

Unlike traditional procurement, which focuses more on price and speed, strategic procurement solutions leverage data, supplier relationships, and institutional priorities to deliver greater value over time. It’s about transforming procurement into a proactive, strategic function that strengthens the entire institution.

Strategic procurement management requires a commitment to collaboration across finance, administration, and academic leadership. It’s the only way to make sure you meet budget targets and advance the broader mission of your institution.

What Is the Strategic Procurement Process?

While every institution’s approach is unique, a well-defined strategic procurement process ensures consistency, transparency, and measurable outcomes. Strategic procurement planning typically includes five steps. Let’s look at each and provide specific actions you should take.

1. Spend Analysis and Opportunity Assessment

Begin by analyzing your spend data to identify inefficiencies, redundancies, and opportunities for consolidation. A clear spend analysis provides the foundation for all other decisions in the process.

Action Items:

  • Consolidate data from finance, procurement, and departmental budgets to build a complete picture of spend.
  • Identify top categories of spend and evaluate opportunities for consolidation or cooperative agreements.
  • Benchmark costs against industry averages and peer institutions to uncover hidden inefficiencies.

 

E&I Cooperative Services can be a big help here. We offer no-cost Strategic Spend Assessments (SSAs) to members. Our data analysts will do a thorough review of your spending data and find areas where you can bring more spend under contract, achieve greater volume discounts, and apply cooperative contracts to reduce overall spending.

2. Category Management and Strategy Development

Strategic procurement management includes a category-based approach, grouping similar goods and services to unlock greater negotiating power and sourcing strategies. Category management also makes for better visibility into supplier performance and lifecycle costs.

Action Items:

  • Group purchases into logical categories (IT, facilities, food services, lab equipment, etc.) to increase leverage.
  • Develop category-specific sourcing strategies aligned with institutional goals, such as sustainability or supplier diversity.
  • Establish performance metrics for each category to track supplier effectiveness.

 

E&I has category specialists who can help you develop long-term roadmaps that align with your goals or fill in gaps in your knowledge base about specific categories. This information often includes insight into product lifecycles and development for key suppliers to help with strategic procurement planning over a longer timeline.

3. Supplier Selection and Negotiation

Rather than choosing suppliers solely on price, you need to evaluate suppliers on compliance, financial stability, sustainability practices, and the ability to innovate. It’s all about how the total cost of ownership adds up and aligns with your goals.

“It’s not just about how much money you can save. It is holistically about how can you have cost avoidance? How can you bring value?
– Lenora Sevillian, Director of Procurement at Nova Southeastern University, in Supply Chain Dive

Negotiations need to emphasize long-term value and risk reduction.

Action Items:

  • Use prequalification criteria to screen suppliers for compliance, diversity, and financial health.
  • Build multi-year supplier partnerships rather than focus on single-bid transactions.
  • Negotiate on total value (including service levels, innovation, and sustainability) and not just unit cost.

 

4. Contract Management and Compliance

Strong contract governance is essential for strategic procurement services. Contracts should include clear performance expectations, compliance requirements, and risk mitigation strategies.

Action Items:

  • Standardize contract templates to ensure consistency across departments and reduce compliance risk.
  • Incorporate service-level agreements (SLAs) and measurable KPIs into every contract.
  • Schedule periodic contract reviews to ensure terms remain aligned with evolving needs and regulations.

 

Standardizing and centralizing your strategic procurement management process can significantly improve your approach. E&I’s cooperative agreements can help, offering access to hundreds of competitively solicited contracts designed specifically for the education sector to meet common compliance requirements.

5. Performance Monitoring and Continuous Improvement

Ongoing monitoring ensures suppliers deliver on commitments. Analytics and KPIs track spend, compliance, and supplier performance to close the loop on your strategic procurement solutions.

Action Items:

  • Implement dashboards or reporting tools to track supplier performance and institutional spend in real time.
  • Establish regular performance reviews with key suppliers to encourage accountability.
  • Continuously refine sourcing strategies based on lessons learned and market trends.

 

While you might take this for granted, a 2025 study showed that fewer than 10% of colleges and universities have a reliable tracking process in place to show that the perceived value is actually delivered.

The Strategic Procurement Planning Process

Step

Primary Focus

Key Action Items

Spend Analysis

Identify inefficiencies and savings opportunities

Consolidate spend data, categorize expenses, benchmark costs

Category Management

Build leverage and category-specific strategies

Group purchases, align with goals, set metrics

Supplier Selection

Choose and negotiate for long-term value

Screen suppliers, form partnerships, negotiate total value

Contract Management

Ensure compliance and governance

Standardize templates, embed SLAs, review regularly

Performance Monitoring

Track and refine supplier performance

Use dashboards, hold reviews, continuously adjust strategies

How Do You Create a Strategic Procurement Planning Framework?

Strategic procurement planning provides the roadmap for aligning sourcing activities with your institutional goals.

Setting Clear Objectives

You must first establish your objectives. Are you trying to radically reduce costs? Meet sustainability goals to show demonstrable reductions in carbon emissions? Ensure compliance? Reduce risk and solidify supply chains?

Likely, you’ll need to do all of these things (and more). But without clear targets, planning cannot be measured or evaluated.

Risk Management and Compliance Controls

Higher education procurement operates under strict compliance requirements, including federal and state regulations. A strong framework builds in compliance controls while assessing risks such as supplier instability, market fluctuations, or regulatory changes.

Disruptions are less frequent than a few years ago but likely to increase with inflation, geopolitical conflicts, and tariff concerns. We’re still seeing problem areas throughout the education sector. For example, 92% of food service programs report supply chain disruptions that caused operational challenges.

Continuity is still an issue for many institutions, too. While 57% of organizations report having mitigation plans, the rest admit they have no backup plan for supply chain disruptions. Without redundancy and resiliency, you risk being caught off guard by supplier failures or geopolitical shocks.

Technology Enablement

Digital tools like eProcurement platforms, catalog services, and analytics dashboards are critical for enabling strategic procurement services. These technologies improve your efficiency, visibility, and compliance while providing valuable data for decision-making.

They can also reduce your maverick spend by offering access to pre-approved catalogs that are under contract to stakeholders.

Stakeholder Engagement

Speaking of which, your strategic planning framework must involve your key stakeholders (faculty, administrators, finance, and IT) to make sure that that you realize the full benefits of strategic procurement and address all of your institutional needs.

What Are the Benefits of Strategic Procurement?

The benefits of strategic procurement create both measurable and intangible value.

Cost Savings and Efficiency Gains

Strategic sourcing, cooperative agreements, and category management can help reduce costs. Using cooperative purchasing, for example, can often produce cost reductions of 10–15% by aggregating demand across multiple institutions and tapping into larger volume discounts.

Compliance and Risk Mitigation

With regulatory environments tightening and government policy changes coming quickly these days, institutions rely on their procurement teams to ensure compliance and minimize risks. Your strategic procurement framework will help guide you.

Advancing Institutional Priorities

Sustainability, supplier diversity, and community engagement can be built directly into procurement decisions, allowing you to advance priorities that matter to your students, faculty, and stakeholders.

Stronger Supplier Relationships and Innovation

Long-term supplier partnerships foster collaboration, innovation, and shared value. Suppliers often provide new technologies, services, and cost-saving measures when integrated strategically. Your strategic procurement process can produce partnerships with key suppliers to help you optimize value.

Data-Driven Insights

You also benefit from access to data as part of your procurement strategy. This gives you more visibility into spend patterns, risks, and opportunities for optimization.

What Are Best Practices for Strategic Procurement Services?

Institutions that leverage strategic procurement services typically see stronger results. Here are a few best practices that make a difference.

Centralizing and Standardizing Procurement

Centralized processes eliminate duplication, reduce risk, and ensure greater control over compliance and institutional objectives.

“The financial strain faced by many colleges and universities, along with the need for a systemic approach to these strategic choices, is prompting institutions to adopt a more centralized approach to managing resources.”
Deloitte 2025 Higher Education Trends

Leveraging Cooperative Agreements and Partnerships

Using pre-negotiated cooperative contracts eliminates the need for lengthy RFPs, while driving cost savings and compliance benefits. This is one of the most effective strategic procurement solutions available to higher education today and can yield nearly immediate savings.

Implementing Strategic Spend Assessments

Strategic spend assessments uncover hidden savings and help institutions build category-specific sourcing strategies. They provide a baseline for more advanced planning and optimization. E&I Cooperative Services provides no-cost spend assessments for members.

Investing in Professional Development

Staff training and development ensure procurement teams can keep pace with evolving technologies, compliance requirements, and market dynamics. E&I’s EdPro Hub community provides an opportunity for procurement professionals to share strategies, tactics, and solve challenges.

Using Data Analytics to Drive Strategy

Real-time dashboards, spend analysis tools, and supplier scorecards give procurement leaders the visibility to make better decisions.

Building a Future-Ready Procurement Function

Strategic procurement is a necessary evolution for higher education institutions facing budgetary pressures, compliance demands, and rising stakeholder expectations. By focusing on long-term value creation, implementing defined processes, and leveraging technology and partnerships, you can create a procurement strategy that is efficient and reduces costs.

E&I Cooperative Services is the only member-owned nonprofit cooperative focused exclusively on education procurement. We help more than 6,200 academic institutions save time, reduce costs, and stay compliant. Members have access to hundreds of competitively solicited cooperative agreements backed by a team of experienced professional and category specialists and resources to optimize your strategic procurement services.

FAQs—Frequently Asked Questions About Strategic Procurement in Higher Education

What’s the difference between strategic and traditional procurement?

Traditional procurement focuses on immediate, transactional purchasing, while strategic procurement takes a long-term, mission-driven approach that aligns sourcing with institutional priorities and risk management.

What are the key steps in the strategic procurement process?

The process typically includes spend analysis, category management, supplier selection, contract management, and ongoing performance monitoring.

How does strategic procurement reduce costs?

By consolidating spend, leveraging cooperative agreements, and building supplier partnerships, institutions can achieve significant savings and reduce inefficiencies.

How do you measure strategic procurement success?

Success is measured through cost savings, compliance performance, supplier scorecards, stakeholder satisfaction, and progress toward institutional goals such as sustainability or diversity.

Contact E&I Cooperative Services, the only member-owned nonprofit sourcing cooperative focused exclusively on the education sector. Start saving time and money with cooperative agreements designed for higher ed.

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