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Procurement typically happens quietly, behind the scenes, but the effectiveness of the process directly affects campus operations and your ability to serve your students and faculty. Unfortunately, many campuses use outdated processes or have procurement teams that are short-staffed or overloaded with work, leaving little time for a more strategic procurement process.
“The impact of outdated procurement processes is rarely visible to students, parents, or even faculty, but its effects are unmistakable. Slow purchasing becomes slow progress. Delays in issuing or evaluating solicitations leave classrooms waiting for curriculum materials, campuses waiting for technology, researchers waiting for tools, and facilities teams waiting for essential upgrades.” — OpenGov.com
On top of that, there’s often a disconnect that adds to your frustration. You’ve probably lived this situation: you find the perfect solution based on requirements, negotiate a strong contract, get it approved, and then watch departments ignore it and buy from someone they already know. The contract sits unused, while spend fragments across suppliers you’ve never heard of and never vetted.
There’s a better way. Applying strategic procurement best practices can provide you with a practical roadmap for modernizing procurement, strengthening governance, and creating greater value.
Strategic procurement is talked about like it’s some aspirational state that institutions reach after years of effort. While there is some upfront work that goes into establishing strategic procurement strategies, it’s really more of a decision about how you operate, not a maturity level you achieve.
So, what is strategic procurement really? It’s a way of managing purchasing as a long-term institutional function rather than just a series of transactions. A strategic procurement process asks questions like:
What it replaces is reactive procurement where your team spends most of its time responding to urgent requests, processing requisitions, and firefighting contract expirations. In reactive mode, you’re constantly busy, but never quite getting ahead. Strategic procurement gets you ahead because you plan for what’s coming and shape how decisions are made before they reach your desk.
For higher education, specifically, this means accounting for things that don’t exist in corporate procurement: decentralized decision-making across colleges and departments, public accountability and audit requirements, the need for continuity in research and instruction, and purchasing driven by grant requirements or faculty preference as much as institutional strategy.
Strategic procurement doesn’t eliminate those complexities, but it does build a framework that works with them instead of fighting them.
Many institutions consider strategic sourcing vs strategic procurement as no different. However, treating these processes the same can cause problems.
Strategic sourcing is the work of selecting suppliers and establishing contracts. It’s market research, RFPs, negotiations, and award decisions. Good sourcing provides competitive pricing, favorable terms, and compliant agreements.
Strategic procurement governs the full lifecycle, including how:
Here’s where this might show up in practice. You negotiate a great enterprise software agreement with lower pricing, better terms, and a three-year commitment. That’s sourcing. But if half your departments keep buying one-off licenses from other vendors because they don’t know about the enterprise agreement or find it too complicated to use, you’re not meeting your strategic procurement objectives.
Strategic procurement improves adoption.
FOCUS | Strategic Sourcing | Strategic Procurement |
Primary GOAL | Supplier selection and contracting | End-to-end procurement governance |
Time horizon | Project or category cycle | Long-term institutional strategy |
Scope | Market engagement and negotiation | Strategy, purchasing behavior, performance |
Ownership | Procurement or sourcing team | Procurement leadership and governance |
Success metrics | Pricing, contract terms | Realized value, compliance, outcomes |
Role in higher education | Establishes compliant agreements | Ensures contracts are used and optimized |
You need both of these strategic procurement solutions. Sourcing without governance leads to unused contracts. Procurement without strong sourcing leads to less effective contracts.
Most institutions list the same procurement objectives: cost savings, compliance, efficiency. While these are critical, they only tell part of the story, and they can actually work against you if not defined in more concrete terms.
Strategic procurement strategies need to be specific to your institutional reality. Strategic procurement best practices might tighten these objectives, such as prioritizing cost optimization, compliance, supplier relationships, and reducing administrative burden.
You’re not just trying to spend less today. You’re trying to reduce total cost of ownership, avoid unnecessary demand, and eliminate administrative waste. A $10,000 savings that creates $15,000 in ongoing support costs is a big mistake.
Audit readiness matters, but chasing compliance after purchasing happens is exhausting. The objective is to embed compliance into your workflows, so It’s not left to the last minute or after-the-fact.
In education, supply chain disruption can derail semesters or halt research. The objective is building relationships where performance, transparency, and accountability are part of the equation.
Every institution wants to streamline procurement, but if your streamlining adds three new approval steps, you’ve failed. The objective is simplicity that scales: fewer decisions, clearer pathways, less time wasted on low-value transactions.
Strategic procurement isn’t a single methodology. It’s a set of strategies you apply based on category characteristics, institutional priorities, and capacity constraints.
Category management means treating groups of related spend as portfolios you actively manage over time. Instead of responding to requisitions as they arrive, you plan the category, assign ownership, understand the market, and build supplier relationships that last.
Supplier rationalization sounds like consultant-speak for “fire vendors.” That’s not what it means. It means reducing fragmentation where it hurts you. If you use 15 office supply vendors across campus, you have no leverage, no volume pricing, and no accountability. Consolidating to fewer suppliers gives you all three.
Reducing off-contract spend is a recurring strategic priority, but policies and enforcement don’t always fix the problem. People buy off-contract for predictable reasons:
Fix those three things and maverick spend drops.
Cooperative purchasing is often positioned as a shortcut: use someone else’s contract and skip the RFP. That’s true, but it misses the strategic value. Strategically adopted cooperative contracts reduce sourcing cycle times, giving you the time you need to work on strategic procurement solutions.
When you partner with E&I Cooperative Services, you get access to hundreds of competitively solicited cooperative contracts. More importantly, however, you get experienced, education procurement professionals and category specialists who can help you improve your strategic procurement process and find even greater savings. By focusing on the total economic benefit, you can significantly reduce costs, avoid costs, capture greater incentives, increase revenue opportunities, and deliver long-term value.
Strategic procurement is most effective when it follows a repeatable, institution-wide process. While this can be challenging in decentralized purchasing environments, setting in place the right strategies can make a big difference.
You must first understand your current spend, supplier list, and risk exposure. This helps you identify any potential concerns upfront and also where your efforts will produce the greatest returns. You’ll also need to focus on:
Phase | Purpose | Key Activities | Outcome |
Assessment | Establish baseline | Spend analysis, risk review | Prioritized opportunities |
Planning | Define strategy | Category planning, governance alignment | Approved procurement roadmap |
Execution | Implement strategy | Contract activation, stakeholder enablement | Increased adoption |
Measurement | Validate impact | Savings validation, utilization tracking | Continuous improvement |
Strategic procurement best practices in higher education focus on discipline, consistency, and institutional alignment. Building sustainable strategic procurement solutions requires a strong framework.
Most colleges and universities don’t operate with fully centralized purchasing authority, so you need to establish clear ownership and processes without slowing things down or undermining departmental expertise. This includes:
Rather than attempting to apply the same level of rigor to all spend, mature institutions focus strategic effort where it has the greatest impact. Category-based planning allows you to use your time more effectively by:
When you make things clear and easy to utilize contracts, you’ll see higher levels of participation. These strategies provide:
Data is central to sustaining strategic procurement. You need:
Higher education institutions are in constant motion. Enrollment patterns shift, funding models evolve, regulatory requirements expand. You know the drill and the need to evolve as things change. Your strategic procurement solutions need to include:
Strategic procurement really needs to be an ongoing discipline. You build continuous improvement into your process and culture by:
As educational institutions face structural constraints, including limited staff capacity, decentralized purchasing environments, and the administrative burden of repeated sourcing events, E&I Cooperative Services is structured to support institutions as they move from strategic planning to consistent execution.
As the nation’s only member-owned, nonprofit sourcing cooperative focused exclusively on education, E&I provides procurement support that aligns with higher education governance and compliance. Competitively solicited cooperative agreements are structured to meet these requirements and negotiated to serve the unique needs of education.
FAQs—Frequently Asked Questions About Strategic Procurement Strategies
Why do strategic procurement strategies matter for decentralized campuses?
Strategic procurement strategies provide structure and consistency without eliminating autonomy. Even across diverse academic environments, you can improve risk management and contract utilization without impacting flexibility.
What does a strategic procurement process typically include?
A strategic procurement process includes assessment and planning, category strategy development, execution and adoption, and ongoing measurement to ensure you’re maximizing value.
How do strategic procurement solutions support internal procurement teams?
Strategic procurement solutions extend your internal capacity by providing market intelligence, compliant contracting options, and economic benefit. For example, E&I Cooperative Services’ category experts can provide deep insight to support your procurement team.
What are common strategic procurement objectives for educational institutions?
Typically, these include cost optimization, compliance and audit readiness, supplier performance and continuity, reduced administrative burden, and alignment with long-term institutional goals.
How can institutions measure the success of strategic procurement best practices?
This starts with the right measurement processes in place to determine actual savings, cost avoidance, contract utilization, supplier performance, and efficiency rather than volume and total spend.
To explore cooperative contracts, procurement expertise, and education-focused strategic solutions, connect with an E&I procurement expert or browse hundreds of cooperative contracts developed exclusively for educational institutions.