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Things haven’t gotten any easier when it comes to higher education finances. A Deloitte analysis is sobering, highlighting that more than half of large public universities now generate operating deficits, and midsized universities show a “weak financial outlook” with many at risk of insolvency if enrollments continue to decline.
For procurement teams, this means tighter budgets and more pressure to control costs. In this environment, procurement must become increasingly strategic in managing institutional spend and supporting responsible stewardship.
Designing future-ready procurement requires a disciplined approach. If you haven’t evaluated your procurement process steps in a while, now is the time to take a holistic look at how you’re set up and whether you’re ready for the future.
Many academic institutions still suffer from key stumbling blocks that prevent procurement efficiency and cost control, such as:
Clear procurement processes help address these challenges by establishing consistent workflows for evaluating suppliers, approving purchases, and managing contracts. At the same time, strong governance builds accountability.
Creating future-ready procurement process steps starts with understanding your institution’s maturity when it comes to purchasing.
Technology will be part of future-proofing your organization, but before you can fully automate, you need to evaluate your data. Manually having to pour through data is becoming harder as workloads increase and headcounts decline, yet an analysis of operating budgets shows that nearly three-quarters of institutions lack the clean data needed to automate and adopt AI tools. Those that do, however, report 25% (or higher) improvements in key performance metrics.
Spend analytics needs to be embedded in your procurement process steps, and that means data must be aggregated and normalized across departments to create a single source of truth. Evaluate whether your current systems can support automation like API-first and cloud native integrations.
Beyond the data itself, futureproofing requires a shift in human capital. Your audit should also evaluate your team’s digital literacy. In 2026, AI fluency has become a core requirement.
eProcurement, ERP, and P2P systems must work together. Fortunately, the time of “rip and replace” suites of software has ended. Today, the focus is on composable procurement, integrated tools that connect with your data layer rather than stand-alone software.
For example, predictive analytics allows you to move from point-in-time reporting to continuous intelligence to forecast demand and anticipate potential supply disruptions. Automation is getting an upgrade as well. AI agents can handle low-value tasks like contract summarization, supplier onboarding, and tail-spend management, allowing you to focus on strategic analysis rather than data gathering.
Move beyond price-chasing to a model that evaluates the total cost of ownership (TCO) and long-term institutional alignment. Key strategies here include:
It’s also worth reviewing your governance framework to make sure you provide clear expectations for staff. Procurement policy examples include:
The clearer your procurement policy examples are, the more likely departments will follow your procurement process steps.
With your data and workflow in place, you can analyze spend across AP and purchasing card programs to find efficiencies.
You can sort spend by categories to find areas with the highest value, providing a roadmap for where to focus efforts that will make the most impact. You can look for off-contract purchasing where you can lower costs by utilizing contract rates or find opportunities to consolidate suppliers to lower the administrative burden and expand volume discounts.
E&I Cooperative Services offers Strategic Spend Assessments that help education institutions analyze purchasing data and identify opportunities to strengthen their procurement strategy. This no-cost evaluation looks at spend data from the past year to find these opportunities, including where adopting cooperative contracts can lower your costs.
Request a Strategic Spend Assessment from E&I Cooperative Services and uncover hidden savings in your spend data, helping you build a more efficient and lower-cost procurement strategy for the future.