Schools and universities typically spend between 25% and 35% of their operating budget on goods and services.
We consider this addressable spend, and our core mission is to help our members drive cost savings within that spend, accomplishing much more with much less.
E&I has developed a strategic and consultative approach to help members rationalize and streamline their sourcing and spend activities. We accomplish this using our unique Strategic Spend Assessment (SSA), a structured and repeatable process in which we review and analyze your spend data for opportunities to reduce costs, bring more spend under contract, and maximize spend control and efficiencies.
We begin by looking at your high-level spend data to identify where your portfolio currently aligns with E&I contracts and potential areas of synergy and strategic opportunity.
Typically, this comprises 12-month spend data that is readily accessible in your Accounts Payable and P-Card systems. An SSA will typically cover the following pillars of strategic opportunity – click each for a brief overview:
The first step of the SSA is to establish a baseline of your existing spend with E&I. Understanding this spend is foundational in allowing us to serve you effectively. We typically provide a snapshot that highlights your institution’s purchases for three consecutive years.
We look at your existing commodity spend and determine if you could achieve cost savings by bringing it under contract. If you already have a contract with a supplier, this also provides an opportunity to compare the strength of that offering to E&I’s comparable contract.
Schools and universities often have many suppliers for a specific commodity or category. This can spiral over time, resulting in a scenario where the institution is managing more suppliers than necessary, leading to inefficiencies, higher costs, and lost leverage opportunities. Through supplier consolidation we will review your spend data, identify opportunities to reduce your supplier base, and redirect spend toward your best available option.
Supplier under-reporting of E&I contract spend volume could impact your institution’s potential patronage distributions. In this step, we perform a comprehensive analysis, and identify any variances so that we can take the appropriate steps to resolve the disparities.
We identify future alignment opportunities for cost savings and supplier consolidation through E&I, using both our existing contracts and upcoming RFPs. This allows you to plan ahead and determine where you can take advantage of our NIGP-validated RFP process. This can free up your team’s efforts to focus on other strategic activities that create value for your institution.
When conducting an SSA with E&I, all you need to do is provide your high-level spend data. We take care of the rest, with each SSA assigned a dedicated Sourcing Consultant and Strategic Sourcing Analyst.
You’ll receive a customized report outlining opportunities identified in each of the five categories, which facilitates a strategic conversation about your contract portfolio and enables us to help you optimize your sourcing strategy.
E&I’s Strategic Spend Assessment is a data-driven analysis service that takes a critical look at your institution’s spend, leveraging the principles of strategic sourcing to find opportunities for cost savings, revenue generation, and increased diversity spend.
There is absolutely no cost to our members. E&I’s SSA is a consultative process that aims to help members rationalize and streamline their sourcing and spend activities.
We recommend contacting your E&I Member Representative, as they will lead the engagement. You can find out who your Member Representative is and get their contact information here.
E&I will provide you with a formal written report with our findings and recommendations. Additionally, your E&I Member Representative will present these findings and recommendations to you in a consultative meeting, then help you implement any solutions you are interested in pursuing.
You will need to provide your full spend history by supplier for a 12-month period, including AP and card transactions. While we typically ask for a full year of your institution’s spend data, that can be calendar year, fiscal year, or any meaningful period that provides a 12-month snapshot in time. We do not need transaction-level detail; total spend by supplier is all that’s required.
Typically, members pull data from their accounts payable system and card program.
No – E&I only needs summary spend by supplier. Transaction-level data is not required
Absolutely. We will always plan to conduct all pillars or components of the Strategic Spend Assessment, as we think it gives our members a great baseline and starting point. If, once you’ve reviewed the report, you prefer to focus on one or two pillars – for example Contract Portfolio Alignments and Supplier Consolidation – then that’s where we’ll focus. Most of our engaged members are committing to the full range of components.
E&I takes member privacy concerns very seriously and all data shared is 100% confidential. No one outside of E&I will ever see your data, and even within E&I, access is restricted to a select group comprising our Data Analysts, Sourcing Consultants, and related leaders. We are also more than happy to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) if that is something that is required by your institution.
If you need help with internal communications regarding data requirements or security, we can help! Please let your E&I Member Representative know; he or she can help schedule a call with the manager of our analytics team to provide assistance.
Your Member Representative will be your primary point of contact. He or she will engage other E&I team members as needed to deliver the SSA.
No – we are providing this as a service. Members can choose to take action, or not, based on our findings and recommendations. We certainly hope that some of the opportunities will be too good not to pursue. As your member-owned cooperative, the SSA is just one example of how we are continuously looking for opportunities to bring additional value to your institution
Not at all. The SSA has been designed as a very repeatable process. If E&I conducts an SSA for you and you realize tangible benefits for your institution, we recommend repeating the SSA on a regular cadence. This could be annually or at any cadence you are comfortable with.
