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Strategic Spend Assessments

Schools and universities typically spend between 25% and 35% of their operating budget on goods and services.
We consider this addressable spend, and our core mission is to help our members drive cost savings within that spend, accomplishing much more with much less.

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What is an SSA?

Ready to rationalize and streamline your sourcing and spend activities? We can help!

Available to E&I members, our unique Strategic Spend Assessments (SSA) provide a strategic, consultative approach to helping you find efficiencies.

An SSA is a structured and repeatable process in which we review and analyze your spend data for opportunities to reduce costs, bring more spend under contract, and maximize spend control and efficiencies.

How it Works

We begin by looking at your high-level spend data to identify where your portfolio currently aligns with E&I contracts and potential areas of synergy and strategic opportunity.
Typically, this comprises 12-month spend data that is readily accessible in your Accounts Payable and P-Card systems. An SSA will typically cover the following pillars of strategic opportunity:

E&I Supplier Reported Contract Spend
Contract Portfolio Alignments
Consolidation Potential
Contract Spend Variance
Strategic Roadmap Alignment Opportunities
What to Expect

From You

All you need to do is provide your high-level spend data. That’s it… really! We take care of the rest.

From Us

Each SSA is assigned a dedicated Sourcing Consultant and Strategic Sourcing Analyst. We’ll provide you with a customized report outlining opportunities identified in each of the five categories above.

Together

This report is used to facilitate a strategic conversation about your contract portfolio and enables us to help you optimize your sourcing strategy.

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Strategic Spend Assessments are consultative processes where E&I analyzes your spend data to help you make strategic decisions
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Take a Look Inside

Strategic Spend Assessments are a proprietary and consultative service provided to members by E&I. Check out this sample report for an illustrative representation of an SSA.

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Frequently Asked Questions

E&I’s Strategic Spend Assessment is a data-driven analysis service that takes a critical look at your institution’s spend, leveraging the principles of strategic sourcing to find opportunities for cost savings, revenue generation, and increased diversity spend.

There is absolutely no cost to our members. E&I’s SSA is a consultative process that aims to help members rationalize and streamline their sourcing and spend activities.

We recommend contacting your E&I Member Representative, as they will lead the engagement. You can find out who your Member Representative is and get their contact information here.

E&I will provide you with a formal written report with our findings and recommendations. Additionally, your E&I Member Representative will present these findings and recommendations to you in a consultative meeting, then help you implement any solutions you are interested in pursuing.

You will need to provide your full spend history by supplier for a 12-month period, including AP and card transactions. While we typically ask for a full year of your institution’s spend data, that can be calendar year, fiscal year, or any meaningful period that provides a 12-month snapshot in time. We do not need transaction-level detail; total spend by supplier is all that’s required.

Typically, members pull data from their accounts payable system and card program.

No – E&I only needs summary spend by supplier.  Transaction-level data is not required

Absolutely. We will always plan to conduct all pillars or components of the Strategic Spend Assessment, as we think it gives our members a great baseline and starting point. If, once you’ve reviewed the report, you prefer to focus on one or two pillars – for example Contract Portfolio Alignments and Supplier Consolidation – then that’s where we’ll focus. Most of our engaged members are committing to the full range of components.

E&I takes member privacy concerns very seriously and all data shared is 100% confidential. No one outside of E&I will ever see your data, and even within E&I, access is restricted to a select group comprising our Data Analysts, Sourcing Consultants, and related leaders. We are also more than happy to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) if that is something that is required by your institution.

If you need help with internal communications regarding data requirements or security, we can help! Please let your E&I Member Representative know; he or she can help schedule a call with the manager of our analytics team to provide assistance.

Your Member Representative will be your primary point of contact. He or she will engage other E&I team members as needed to deliver the SSA.

No – we are providing this as a service. Members can choose to take action, or not, based on our findings and recommendations. We certainly hope that some of the opportunities will be too good not to pursue. As your member-owned cooperative, the SSA is just one example of how we are continuously looking for opportunities to bring additional value to your institution

Not at all. The SSA has been designed as a very repeatable process. If E&I conducts an SSA for you and you realize tangible benefits for your institution, we recommend repeating the SSA on a regular cadence. This could be annually or at any cadence you are comfortable with.

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