Business
ARTWORK © BRIAN ISHAM
MANAGING HIGHER ED
Spend and Save
Universities with multiple campuses are moving to centralized purchasing.
BY SHER R IE NEGR EA
F
OR DECADES, THE SEVEN
campuses administered by
Indiana University each had
purchasing offices that would buy office
equipment, lab supplies, and other products for their faculty and staff. But in 2010,
that process changed when the university
system consolidated its procurement into
one office.
Since then, Indiana University has
saved $162M in contracting costs, plus an
additional $17.3M from transitioning to
electronic invoicing and purchase orders.
"We've really been able to do a much better
job of benchmarking, looking at our savings across the institution, and leveraging the use of our contracts across all the
campuses," says Jill M. Schunk, associate
vice president in the Office of Procurement
at Indiana University.
As large university systems face
tightening budgets, they are restructuring
their purchasing operations by consolidating them and leveraging their spending to
lower costs. While some university systems
such as Indiana have moved to a com-
plete centralization of purchasing, others
have developed other models that allow
individual campuses some autonomy over
spending decisions.
"Leveraging system-wide spending to
achieve optimum value is a major change
in higher education," says William Cooper,
associate vice president and chief procurement officer for the University of California
Office of the President. "Procurement has
not been an area where there has been a
consolidated and streamlined approach.
The sourcing decisions were made out on
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