Procurement in higher education used to be a back-office function, often undervalued. As long as you stayed within your budget and made sure your institutions had the goods and services it needed, procurement often operated quietly, behind the scenes.
No more. Budget challenges, uncertain finances, enrollment concerns, layoffs—all spending is front and center now and scrutinized more carefully. In many cases, you’re asked to do a monumental job to lower costs for higher education purchasing while at the same time, prices continue to climb.
You need a more strategic framework. Operating the same way you’ve done for years no longer cuts it. For example, academic institutions still spend an average of 19.6 hours to go from requisition to purchase order, pulling together all of the paperwork and getting the necessary approvals. That’s the longest cycle of any industry studied in the 2025 Procurement Benchmark Report. And that doesn’t include the weeks or months spent on developing, soliciting, and evaluating RFPs before purchasing gets underway.
Now multiply that time spent when individual departments go it alone. Quite simply, you need a more efficient way, and that starts with a strategic procurement framework.
While you make institutional procurement best practices a part of your daily operations, you create a more efficient process with greater transparency and accountability. Does your institution have these best practices in place?
Think about how many times a purchase request gets stuck because someone wasn’t sure whose approval they needed, or paperwork went missing somewhere in the chain. When you establish uniform workflows and clear approval paths, you eliminate those frustrating delays. Digital routing systems can help here, automatically sending requests to the right people and reducing the back-and-forth emails that eat up everyone’s time.
Data silos are the enemy of good decision-making. When your procurement software talks to your finance system, ERP, and inventory management—actually talks to them, not just exports spreadsheets back and forth—you get visibility into what’s really happening across campus. You can pull up real-time reports without chasing down information from three different systems. And when audit season rolls around? Your compliance tracking is ready.
Your relationships with suppliers matter a lot and so does tracking how well they’re performing. For example, are they:
When you use supplier management tools, it’s easier to answer these questions quickly instead of scrambling through filing cabinets when issues arise. The key? Track whatever metrics matter to you and use that data to hold your suppliers accountable. FYI, this info is extremely valuable when it’s time for renewals.
You don’t have to negotiate every contract from scratch. Cooperative purchasing agreements save you significant time and money. E&I Cooperative Services cooperative contracts have already done much of the upfront work, including competitive solicitation, legal review, negotiating terms that are favorable to educational institutions, and achieving volume discounts by aggregating demand across similar academic institutions.
You can opt in to these competitive contracts to save time and money. It’s not uncommon to reduce costs by 10–15% just by leveraging cooperative agreements.
How many contracts have you seen auto-renew because nobody noticed the deadline? Or terms that weren’t ideal but got locked in again because there wasn’t time to renegotiate?
Managing the full lifecycle of your contracts from initial negotiation through renewal or termination keeps you in control and eliminates surprise cost increases. It’s critical to automate contract lifecycles for key data and treat renewals as an opportunity to look at alternatives that might reduce costs.
Maverick spending remains one of the biggest sources of waste in higher education procurement. When individual departments buy directly from suppliers without going through established processes, the results are too often predictable. You’ll find duplicate purchases, volume discounts that are missed, compliance headaches, and maybe even safety concerns when products haven’t been properly vetted. Research shows that unauthorized purchasing can erase 10–20% of your potential savings when you just spend within the contracts you’ve negotiated.
However, you need to give your staff the tools to make it easy, like eProcurement, catalog enablement, and automated compliance checks.
Every purchasing decision you make is an opportunity to support your institution’s broader mission. Are you committed to sustainability or supplier inclusion? Then, your procurement practices should reflect that, adding key metrics to your scoring model.
E&I Cooperative Services is the only member-owned nonprofit sourcing cooperative that exclusively serves the education sector, competitively soliciting contracts with top-tier suppliers. By combining demand across 6,000+ academic institutions, E&I achieves volume discounts that are typically unattainable by individual institutions. Explore our cooperative contracts to see how your institution can modernize purchasing, reduce risk, and unlock long-term value.