Spend Control Strategies: How Group Purchasing Transforms Campus Budgets

There’s a new fiscal reality in higher education, and procurement teams are increasingly being asked to thread the needle by finding lower costs without impacting quality. It’s no longer just about hitting budget numbers either. For many institutions, it’s about survival.

The Forvis Mazars and NC State University Poole College of Management’s Annual Higher Education Outlook for 2025 shows that “successful higher education institutions” typically maintain an operational net income of just 2% of total revenue. There’s not much room for error here. Poor planning, inefficient procurement processes, or uncontrolled spending can ripple through budgets and force uncomfortable choices in other areas.

Spend control has become mission-critical. Colleges and universities are increasingly turning to group purchasing strategies to lower costs and reduce administrative overhead to manage budget constraints.

Why Spend Control Matters More Than Ever

Fiscal challenges in higher education may result from changes to funding, enrollment, and grants, but there is only so much control procurement teams have over incoming revenue. You can, however, control how your procurement process works.

Decentralized purchasing processes, fragmented data, and inconsistent contract oversight have made it difficult for institutions to track how and where money is spent. There is an increased need to centralize and digitize the way you manage procurement.

“The financial strain faced by many colleges and universities, along with the need for a systemic approach to these strategic choices, is prompting institutions to adopt a more centralized approach to managing resources.”
– Deloitte 2025 Higher Education Trends

For institutions that are used to decentralized purchasing, centralizing procurement can feel like micromanagement – but that’s not really the case. Centralization strengthens governance and cost control, utilizing standardized contracts and leveraging group purchasing for greater cost reduction. Centralizing procurement gives you greater structure and transparency into your purchasing to create greater efficiencies.

How Group Purchasing Improves Spend Control

Group purchasing strengthens institutional spend control by aggregating demand and leveraging collective buying power across campuses and across multiple institutions. It creates a shared model that leverages greater volume discounts and better financial oversight.

The key benefits of leveraging cooperative contracts include:

• Pricing consistency: Eliminating pricing discrepancies across departments and reducing non-contract spend.
• Compliance assurance: Since cooperative agreements are competitively solicited, you can meet compliance goals and be better prepared for audits.
• Efficiency gains: Streamlining both purchasing and payment workflows.
• Data transparency: Gaining visibility into total spend by category, supplier, or campus.

Here are some of the gains you realize when you shift from decentralized procurement to group purchasing.

Quite simply, this unified approach reduces administrative overhead, lowers procurement costs, and improves your oversight.

5 Spend Control Strategies for Campus Procurement

So, how do you implement these systems? Here are five key steps.

1. Establish centralized visibility: Integrate purchasing data from all departments into a single reporting framework to understand your total institutional spend and identify areas where you can improve cost controls.
2. Implement category management: Segment spend into categories (IT, facilities, MRO, lab supplies) to enable more strategic sourcing and cost tracking.
3. Standardize contracts and suppliers: Use cooperative agreements to eliminate redundant vendors and standardize pricing across departments.
4. Leverage spend analytics: Analyze off-contract spend, supplier consolidation opportunities, and supplier performance.
5. Combine policy and technology: Align governance structures with procurement automation to maintain compliance while reducing your manual workload.

You can also take advantage of a no-cost Strategic Spend Assessment (SSA) from E&I Cooperative Services. An SSA analyzes your spend data to find areas where you can lower costs through cooperative agreements. By benchmarking current procurement practices against peer institutions and cooperative contract opportunities, the SSA uncovers measurable savings and operational improvements.

It helps you align your procurement with E&I’s Total Economic Benefit Model™, which focuses on cost reduction, cost avoidance, and incentives and revenue to drive total cost savings.

From Spend Control to Strategic Value

When spend control becomes embedded in campus operations, the benefits go far beyond reduced purchasing costs. Besides hitting budget goals, centralized oversight also improves forecasting and budgeting accuracy, giving education leaders a more complete picture of spending. For procurement teams, it allows you to shift from managing transactions to strategic purchasing and building long-term value.

With just 2% operational margins, uncontrolled spending isn’t inefficient- it’s existential. Discover how E&I’s eProcurement platform transforms fragmented purchasing into strategic spend control.