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Most procurement leaders recognize the need to move beyond transactional sourcing and toward more structured, category-driven approaches. The challenge here is not about committing to strategy, but about how to turn this strategy into an operating model that delivers measurable, repeatable value.
A strategic procurement plan only succeeds when it is designed for execution.
A strategic procurement plan is a plan designed to establish how your procurement process aligns with your institutional priorities and guides how decisions are made across categories. This can be a big help as you balance multiple priorities:
Not all of these priorities fit neatly together in every sourcing project, so a strategic procurement plan provides a framework to help when these priorities conflict or you have to make tradeoffs.
Your plan also needs to address category-level strategy. Most colleges and universities are now assigning ownership to their major spend categories within their procurement team to build up expertise and form deeper supplier relationships. Moreover, 70% of organizations report applying strategic category management as a way to reduce costs and improve service levels. When done effectively, EY reports that category management can produce preferred pricing, leading to significant cost savings.
Even mature procurement organizations face structural constraints that can limit execution. Internal teams often manage high transaction volumes, support decentralized stakeholders, and respond to compliance requirements. This leaves limited time for deep category analysis or sustained market engagement.
Strategic procurement services help bridge this gap. Here, you’re not outsourcing your decision-making, but augmenting your procurement team with category experts with specific expertise, data, and scale.
E&I Cooperative Services plays this role for colleges and universities, supporting strategic procurement execution with competitively solicited cooperative contracts, designed to leverage this expertise to produce better outcomes.
Why do some strategic procurement plans succeed and others fail? It’s often a matter of governance and alignment.
You need guidelines for decision-making throughout your sourcing and procurement, including prioritization when conflicts occur. For example, do you prioritize bottom-line cost savings vs. lifetime operating costs vs. sustainability goals? Which one you pick may lead to three different outcomes. Procurement teams must understand the mission and how to navigate conflicting initiatives.
Stakeholder alignment is equally critical in higher education environments where purchasing authority is often distributed. Academic departments, research units, and other stakeholders must understand these governance rules and their underlying logic. Otherwise, they may see procurement as limiting their options rather than meeting larger institutional goals.
Transparency here is crucial to building trust and increasing adoption.
A phased approach to building your strategic procurement plan is typically your best bet. Trying to redesign all of your categories at the same time can often overwhelm teams or cause things to fall through the cracks.
A typical phased approach might look like this.
Phase 1: Creating a Shared Baseline
This phase focuses on spend visibility and category segmentation. Institutions identify where spend is concentrated, which categories present the greatest opportunity, and which areas are constrained by timing or operational risk.
Phase 2: Category Strategy Development
For categories, develop guidance for sourcing, contracts, and supplier structures. Within each category, analyze spend to look for opportunities to:
Phase 3: Execution and Change Management
Execution requires more than contract activation. This is where change management principles come into play. You’ll need regular communication and clear guidance across departments if you want to drive adoption.
Active management, including any friction you get during implementation, can go a long way in resolving challenges. Especially in a decentralized purchasing environment, a lack of buy-in can negate any potential cost savings and make meeting institutional goals more challenging.
Phase 4: Performance Measurement and Continuous Improvement
Once you’ve established your plan, you will want to review and measure performance, supplier service levels, cost savings, and changes in the marketplace. An effective strategic procurement plan isn’t static and will evolve as things change.
With today’s budget challenges, there’s increased pressure to find cost savings, but that’s only one aspect of strategic sourcing. In fact, cost savings alone doesn’t truly represent the value of strategic procurement in higher ed.
The E&I Economic Benefit Model provides a structured approach to capturing both direct and indirect benefits. In addition to hard savings, the model accounts for cost avoidance, administrative efficiency, and risk reduction. By translating outcomes into total economic impact, you can communicate value more clearly.
To learn more about strategic procurement services and tools that support strategic procurement plan execution, connect with E&I Cooperative Services today.