Menu
Colleges and universities spend about a quarter of their operating budgets procuring goods and services to keep their schools running efficiently, which adds up to billions of dollars every year. Today, those dollars are under intense scrutiny as budgets tighten.
Some schools are seeing significant budget reductions, and at the same time, prices continue to rise. According to the Commonfund Institute’s Higher Education Price Index, the cost of some services rose nearly 20% between 2019 and 2023, while operating budgets rose just 9.5%. Now, with many schools facing budget declines, the gap is set to widen.
Schools will need to sharpen every solicitation in procurement to effect significant change.
In procurement, solicitation means the process of requesting proposals, bids, or quotes. In most cases, this includes creating a document that outlines what goods or services are needed and inviting suppliers to respond with a bid.
A successful solicitation begins with understanding your academic institution’s needs.
Conducting a needs assessment requires working with various stakeholders within the institution. You need to define the goods or services you require and create detailed descriptions. While you may have reasons for soliciting a specific item, it helps to define your overarching goals. Suppliers may have innovative solutions that can meet your needs if they understand what you are trying to achieve.
You also need to define your KPIs. Suppliers will want to know how their bids will be evaluated and what you consider important. For example, you might prioritize cost for commodity items but focus more on functionality and durability for lab equipment.
A comprehensive needs assessment creates a roadmap for the solicitation process to target the right suppliers and optimize value.
You need to put together a clear solicitation, meaning in the procurement document, you can avoid any misunderstanding. You will want to be as specific as possible about any features or functionality you need, along with the outcomes you expect.
Try to avoid technical language or jargon, except when necessary. In some cases, providing detailed specifications may be essential.
While you are crafting your solicitation, you must define the criteria you will use to evaluate proposals. This goes beyond costs and includes items such as quality, experience, customer service, and total cost of operation (TCO).
You also need to balance these criteria against your college or university’s internal goals. You might have guidelines for sustainable practices, supplier diversity, ethical sourcing, local purchasing, and more. Agree on the key attributes and how you will weigh each one. By providing transparency in your scoring methodology, you can ensure fair treatment for suppliers.
The final step in solicitation in procurement is distribution. Targeted distribution is common, posting opportunities on your website and relevant publications or platforms. Pre-planning can help identify supplies for your outreach activities as well.
Ensure your distribution and solicitation process adheres to your internal guidelines. Pay particular attention to sourcing requirements, especially for targeted funds that may have specific rules attached.
If you have created a strong solicitation document, you can compare proposals based on the weighted criteria you created.
Be alert for areas where suppliers offer services or features you didn’t require. Often, suppliers may have items in product roadmaps that you were unaware of, which may be beneficial, or they may have innovative approaches that meet your needs in other ways. If so, you may need to revise your RFP and reach out to other suppliers, so they have the opportunity to match to avoid compliance issues.
Before you accept a proposal and begin negotiating the contract, you should check with group purchasing organizations (GPOs) to see what is available. GPOs and sourcing cooperatives, like E&I Cooperative Services, leverage the combined buying power of their members to negotiate volume discounts. In many cases, these cooperative contracts can deliver significant savings to colleges and universities.
GPOs bring experience in crafting solicitations that…..(is there an opportunity to add the value-prop of how GPOs can do all of the above?
E&I Cooperative Services has hundreds of competitively solicited contracts that are ready to use. Focusing only on the education sector, E&I works with members and suppliers to craft cooperative contracts with low prices and terms favorable to academic institutions. As the only member-owned, non-profit sourcing cooperative, E&I works on behalf of its member institutions.
View available contracts from E&I Cooperative Services. Streamline your procurement process and lower your costs.
