As part of the Reimagining Cornell effort, the Initiatives Coordination Office identified specific areas that Cornell can target to achieve significant operational savings, one of which is procurement. The directive for the Procurement Initiative is to develop plans and strategies to proactively manage spending, particularly the selection of vendors and the negotiation of commodity pricing, and improve processes, tools, and analytical abilities.
With a primary objective of saving up to $40 million by 2015, Supply Management Services (SMS), along with administrative sponsors, has identified five major objectives for the Procurement Initiative:
1. Implement strategic sourcing
- Implement Phase I by June 2011 ($7.5 - $10 million) – minimal impact
- Implement Phase II by June 2015 ($22.5 - $30 million) – ongoing, sustainable savings
- Adopt a more standardized method of procurement and focus on both strategic sourcing and the utilization and enhancement of procurement and reporting tools
2. Enhance e-SHOP
- Form a customer advisory group
- Reduce the time and effort needed to create an order
- Improve the user interface to make ordering easier
3. Increase marketing and communications
- Develop regular departmental communications to our customers
- Enhance the Web site to make information easily available to our customers
- Provide periodic project updates with opportunities for additional customer input
4. Implement a spend visibility tool
- Continue to utilize Spend Viz to identify opportunities for leveraging spend
- Utilize the tool to better communicate with campus community
5. Streamline SMS’s organizational structure
- Enhance staff capability, capacity, and professionalism
