E&I Members: Make Your Voice Heard in Less Than a Minute! Help us improve your experience-fast, simple, and meaningful.
Nearly every area in education is experiencing increasing costs at the same time as funding levels and budgets remain uncertain. Volume discounts and bulk purchasing have become increasingly important in overcoming these challenges to reduce per-unit costs and strengthen negotiating power.
Bulk purchasing drives volume discounts, but individual institutions are limited in how much of a discount they can achieve. Even the largest systems likely can’t achieve the magnitude that a sourcing cooperative can. For example, E&I Cooperative Services aggregates demand across over 6,000 member institutions to achieve an economy of scale that attracts significant volume discounts.
Suppliers typically offer more competitive pricing when institutions increase order quantities or consolidate multiple purchases. For suppliers, they get access to larger sales while reducing their cost-of-sale and administrative overhead. These savings are often passed on to buyers in terms of lower per-unit pricing and stronger contract terms.
Besides working with cooperative contracts, procurement teams are also increasingly centralizing and consolidating purchasing, buying more in bulk and bringing more spend under contract.
Bulk purchasing stabilizes costs by locking in pricing across a fiscal year or longer time horizons. By purchasing larger quantities at once, you are better protected from unplanned price increases due to inflation, shortages, or supply chain challenges.
Buying in larger increments reduces the frequency of small, repetitive orders that tend to carry higher per-unit costs and greater administrative overhead. It also cuts down on last-minute spot buying, typically the most expensive form of procurement.
Higher consolidated spend typically leads to more favorable supplier terms, such as extended warranties, improved response times, or priority service. Suppliers place greater emphasis on institutions that purchase consistently and in meaningful volume.
It’s not uncommon for large systems to manage several thousand suppliers. Even smaller institutions may have several hundred vendors. This makes deep category management extremely challenging. By consolidating, you can bring more spend under contract to lower costs and manage contracts more effectively. 70% of organizations reported that implementing or improving category management is a priority to drive cost savings.
In turn, consolidation reduces supplier fragmentation, strengthens compliance, simplifies oversight, and lowers administrative effort, delivering benefits that go well beyond just volume discounts.
For most institutions, achieving high volume alone is challenging. Cooperative contracts solve this problem by pooling the power of a large member base. Through this shared purchasing model, you get access to pricing and terms typically available only to the largest buyers.
Cooperative contracts leverage the combined spend of thousands of institutions. For example, E&I Cooperative Services aggregates the buying power of its member institutions, giving members immediate access to high-volume pricing tiers without having to conduct RFPs or negotiations.
This allows institutions to benefit from volume discounts even when their individual purchasing needs are small.
Bulk purchasing through cooperative contracts may include additional benefits and more favorable terms, including:
Consolidating purchasing through cooperative contracts reduces maverick spend and brings campus-wide purchases under consistent agreements. This leads to more accurate forecasting and streamlined financial oversight.
The University of North Carolina Greensboro is a good example of leveraging cooperative contracts at ER&I Cooperative Services.
“The Cooperative’s RFP teams are comprised of subject matter experts who have put together an extremely impressive matrix to determine contract awards,” said Michael Logan, C.P.M., Director of Purchasing & Contracts, UNC Greensboro. Besides immediate savings, Logan cites more favorable contract terms, such as free freight, financial incentives, and rebates.
Structured cooperative sourcing, combined with aggregated volume, generates savings and contract benefits beyond what institutions typically obtain through transactional purchasing. It highlights how cooperatives deliver both financial and operational value through supplier partnerships.
Cooperative agreements enable you to achieve volume discounts even without having to buy in bulk. You may never buy enough light bulbs, office supplies, or lab equipment to get the best price break available, but when you tap into the aggregated demand across thousands of similar institutions, you can achieve the bulk purchasing amounts that trigger significant volume discounts from suppliers.
E&I Cooperative Services is the only nonprofit member-owned sourcing cooperative that exclusively serves the education sector, with hundreds of ready-to-use cooperative contracts that can produce savings of 10–15% while dramatically reducing procurement cycle time.