What need(s) does this project address or fill? What is the problem the project is designed to address? What about the current situation is unacceptable? Why do we need to move forward with this project?
Purchasing supports all the activities on the campuses. Current systems range from pencil, paper and typewriters, to excel spread sheets and three vendor developed semi automated systems. The Business Affairs Commission identified as its highest priority the provision of a modern integrated purchasing system that would allow requests to be entered, approvals applied and the status of requests to be tracked by the initiator. The availability of this system would improve business functioning, increase accountability and provide much better customer service throughout the campus.
A Purchasing system is an integral part of most contemporary business systems. It was originally conceived of as an element of the core financial system in the mid-1980’s but was never developed. Campuses have developed their own systems to meet the increasing needs for rapid effective service, and increased accountability, but some campuses are still without much automated support. Work is duplicated in some cases and the opportunity exists for mistakes when data is manually transferred.
Generally most campuses use a centralized purchasing function, but tracking purchases by the originator is not easily possible. The existing systems are slow and inefficient. Our campus users want an electronic “shopping cart” system. State regulation and accountability requirements put more demands on our staff. Existing systems do not provide for easy management use or the ability to achieve efficiencies through better, faster processing based on good data.
The major driver for a new integrated purchasing system is to improve our service to our campus community by improving efficiencies, eliminating processes that do not add value or are duplicative and improving the integrity of business processes and reducing costs. A new integrated purchasing system will also have the functionality to be able to run reports to identify campus spending patterns, track spending by budget, by commodity code, by departments and sub-groups. With this information purchasing will be able to leverage contracts with their key vendors to provide cost savings to the campuses.