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“To tackle considerable financial headwinds, institutions need to align their financial resources more tightly with their institutional priorities, fostering greater accountability and ensuring that budgeting decisions support long-term goals and values.” — Deloitte’s 2025 Higher Education Trends
This was true in 2025, and it remains accurate in 2026. Colleges and universities need to move beyond transaction-driven purchasing and adopt a structured approach that links procurement decisions directly to financial stewardship, priorities, and value creation. A strategic procurement framework helps purchasing decisions stay true to institutional goals.
A strategic procurement framework establishes consistency, without forcing complete consolidation, and helps provide greater accountability. Since so many purchasing decisions are distributed across campuses and departments in higher education, a strategic procurement model is key to making better purchasing decisions.
Procurement frameworks are most effective when you tie them to institutional priorities, which can change based on current conditions. For several years, there was a focus on sustainability and diversity. With today’s budget constraints, there’s a more intense focus on cost control. Procurement teams have to balance these priorities. Your strategic procurement model provides a framework that allows you to apply different weights to levers as your needs shift.
Designing a strategic procurement framework is a deliberate process, and there are key steps you can take to build a sustainable strategic procurement model.
Before you can build a model, you need a clear understanding of institutional priorities and agreement from institutional leadership. This includes areas like:
A strategic procurement framework needs clear decision rights, such as, who has the authority to make purchasing decisions and approve contracts, who is responsible for category strategies, and how exceptions are handled.
Without a clear understanding, it’s easy for decisions to be left to individual departments that wind up not supporting institutional priorities, even inadvertently. These purchases can undermine efforts to meet your goals and lead to off-contract spend, which drives up costs and may not align with your institutional initiatives.
Grouping similar purchases into categories can provide significant insight into purchases patterns. In higher education, a small number of categories typically account for the largest spend, so concentrating efforts in these areas can have the biggest benefits. BY prioritizing your high-impact spend areas, you can focus resources where they will drive the greatest cost savings, risk reduction, and institutional value.
Data analysis can help you find more ways to support your strategic procurement framework, but this requires visibility into all of your spend. So, even in decentralized purchasing environments, you still need a way to centralize data.
Data can give you insight into:
You can also look for areas where you can bring more spend under contract to achieve greater volume discounts and streamline supplier management.
Rather than presenting a finished framework, conducting working sessions where stakeholders help shape the model can produce dividends. A collaborative approach surfaces friction points early and gives stakeholders a voice in making decisions. As such, they are more likely to adopt the framework and champion it in their areas.
At the same time, it’s important to create a structure that defines roles and flexibility. If stakeholders feel their ability to shape procurement has been taken away, it can feel punitive. Allowing some form of freedom within the framework can go a long way in getting buy-in. Similarly, giving departments the tools to make compliant purchasing easier can help with adoption. The easier the process is, the more likely the framework will be accepted.
E&I can fit squarely into your strategic procurement model by providing access to hundreds of competitively solicited cooperative contracts. As the only nonprofit member-owned sourcing cooperative exclusively serving the education sector, E&I negotiates contracts with top-tier suppliers that meet the unique needs of academic institutions.
With offerings across a broad selection of categories, these cooperative contracts can help you meet your strategic procurement goals while also reducing your costs and streamlining your procurement process.
Browse cooperative contracts at E&I Cooperative Services. Membership is free, and there is no minimum purchase obligation.