With so much uncertainty about budgets, shrinking enrollment, federal funding, and rising costs, procurement and finance teams have to be more creative than ever in managing costs and acquiring the goods and services colleges and universities need.
It may also get harder. There are a series of legislative and regulatory changes that could have serious consequences. The National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) warns about the potential for:
While these may not come to pass, any of them could impact budgets even further. Procurement and finance teams should lean more heavily into cooperative sourcing for higher education to help ease these concerns.
Following a few best practices can help you meet your goals. Here are some of the areas you could consider.
By partnering with a cooperative sourcing organization, you can pool your buying power and secure better pricing and terms. By aggregating purchasing volume across multiple schools, cooperatives can negotiate bigger discounts than a school could generally procure on its own.
This can produce significant savings and stretch your procurement dollars further.
Cooperative sourcing for higher education streamlines the entire procurement process. You get access to cooperative contracts from top-tier and diverse suppliers. Pre-negotiated competitively solicited contracts enable you to accelerate procurement, knowing you’re getting better pricing and compliant purchasing.
Cooperatives bring together procurement professionals from various institutions, so all members can benefit from collective knowledge and best practices. You can learn about proven strategies for better procurement and stay on top of industry trends.
Purchasing cooperatives also tend to have category experts who are immersed in particular types of goods and services. They can provide expertise and insight, especially for categories where you have limited knowledge. Category experts also generally have insight into product development, helping you to futureproof your purchases or find innovative solutions.
Implement digital procurement platforms to automate processes, improve transparency, and centralize information. A centralized platform helps to minimize maverick spending and ensure departments use pre-approved vendors to tap into volume discounts.
If you do not have an eProcurement solution or a way to offer product catalogs and electronic purchasing, some cooperatives offer no-cost eProcurement solutions to help you streamline sourcing, procurement, and supplier management, ensuring seamless access to products and manage, services from your approved catalogs.
Procurement and finance teams today are being tasked with integrating an ever-increasing number of initiatives and compliance regulations. Managing it all takes time. By employing cooperative sourcing for higher education, you can define the procurement process in a more structured way. This frees up time to focus on strategy rather than purchasing.
You can invest more time in managing supplier relationships. Instead of focusing solely on annual audits, you can be more proactive and foster relationships to develop a collaborative approach. Such relationships often yield innovative solutions to problems. Knowing your sustainability goals, for example, a supplier might offer different products or strategies you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
Cooperative sourcing for higher education helps you identify and source from diverse suppliers more easily. Cooperatives can help you find diverse suppliers that align with your goals and values. In many cases, these might be suppliers you might not know about or who might not respond to individual RFPs.
Above all, today, you need to stay agile and be ready for changing needs and market conditions.
While cooperative contracts set the terms and conditions, many agreements allow for customization and volume-based incentives, enabling you to customize (and optimize) your purchasing strategies over time.
As budgets remain tight and the legislative landscape continues to evolve, colleges and universities must make sure their systems and strategies are efficient. In an environment that can be slow to change, procurement and finance teams can redefine the procurement process using cooperative sourcing for higher education.
E&I Cooperative Services is the only member-owned nonprofit sourcing cooperative that focuses exclusively on the education sector. Leveraging the collective purchasing power of over 6,000 academic institutions, E&I has hundreds of cooperative agreements available. Membership is free, and there is no minimum purchasing obligation.
Discover the benefits of becoming a member of E&I Cooperative Services and learn how you can leverage the power of cooperative sourcing for higher education.
