Running a competitive solicitation requires a significant investment of staff time. Creating and issuing a standard public RFP takes an average of 43 hours, while complex, multi-attribute bids can require more than 138 hours.
For procurement teams at school districts, colleges and universities, those hours add up quickly across categories. Cooperative procurement provides another sourcing path, allowing institutions to take advantage of competitively solicited agreements that have already gone through the sourcing, evaluation, and negotiation process.
These agreements can reduce duplicated work and produce significant cost savings.
The fundamental difference is who conducts the original solicitation and who is eligible to use the resulting agreement.
With a traditional institution-specific contract, an academic institution typically manages the entire sourcing process itself. Procurement teams develop requirements with internal stakeholders, issues the solicitation, responds to supplier questions, evaluates proposals, negotiates terms, and awards the agreement.
A cooperative contract is competitively solicited on behalf of institutions by the sourcing cooperative. The work has been completed by the cooperative, making the contract alignment-ready.
Consideration | Institution-Specific Contract | Cooperative Agreement |
Solicitation | Conducted by the individual institution | Conducted through the cooperative |
Intended users | Primarily the soliciting institution | Eligible participating institutions |
Sourcing workload | Institution manages the full process | Much of the competitive sourcing work is already completed |
Purchasing control | Institution decides what and how to buy | Institution retains its purchasing decisions |
Negotiating leverage | Primarily based on institutional requirements and spend | May reflect aggregated demand across participating institutions |
Contract review | Required before award | Still required before institutional use |
The cooperative procurement model can dramatically reduce cycle time without eliminating due diligence.
One misconception about cooperative contracts is that they allow institutions to avoid competitive procurement altogether. In practice, the value of the model depends heavily on the quality and integrity of the underlying solicitation.
Procurement teams may need to demonstrate why a particular purchasing method was used, how competition was addressed, and whether the selected contract complies with institutional or public-sector procurement requirements.
While E&I Cooperative Services follows public procurement rules and awards each contract through a competitive RFP process, institutions should still review the solicitation and award documentation to ensure compliance with state laws and institutional policies.
Cooperative procurement can yield significant cost reductions. Leveraging the aggregated purchasing power of hundreds or thousands of academic institutions can tap into volume pricing individual institutions could not achieve on their own. It’s not unusual to save cost reductions of 10-15% when adopting cooperative contracts.
Using an existing agreement also reduces the work associated with drafting specifications, issuing solicitations, managing supplier communications, coordinating evaluations, negotiating common terms, and documenting an award. With compressed timelines, budget challenges, and smaller support teams, procurement professionals gain valuable time to focus on areas that can have the biggest impact like spend analysis, strategic sourcing, supplier performance management, stakeholder engagement, and identifying opportunities to consolidate fragmented campus spending.
For lean procurement departments, this capacity can be particularly valuable. Teams can devote fewer resources to recreating sourcing work and more to categories where institutional expertise and customized negotiations can generate greater value.
Cooperative agreements work best when integrated into an institution’s overall sourcing strategy rather than treated as a default purchasing method.
Procurement teams can compare available agreements with other sourcing options to look for best-fit opportunities. This makes cooperative procurement a strategic capacity tool as much as a contracting mechanism. It can help institutions determine where an existing competitive process is sufficient and where their resources are better invested in an institution-specific solicitation. The result is a more deliberate allocation of procurement resources based on the complexity and strategic importance of each category, while also saving time and money.
E&I Cooperative Services is the only member-owned, nonprofit cooperative exclusively serving the education sector. E&I serves 6,500 academic institutions and provides access to 260+ competitively solicited agreements across a broad range of products and services. Members also have access to procurement expertise, analytics, digital procurement solutions, and resources designed to help education procurement teams improve efficiency while maintaining control over institutional purchasing decisions.
Learn about all of the benefits of becoming a member of E&I Cooperative Services.