It was when Notre Dame decided almost ten years ago to move from processing paper requisitions to an eProcurement system that “friend of the site” and latest profile in our CPOs on the Rise in 2011 series, Vaibhav Agarwal decided to get into the procurement game. Nine years ago, Vaibhav remembers the team going to meet different department chairs and business managers across the university who could not conceptualize what eProcurement was and felt that more work was being assigned to their users – certainly understandable considering this was 2002 and a long, long time ago in the realm of eProcurement. ND went campus-wide with the initiative in 2004. Like the legendary Fighting Irish football team at this storied university, the procurement services team got a relatively early start when compared to its peers and like the first football teams, took some time to gather real momentum.

Today, Vaibhav is a player-coach and the Director of Procurement Systems for the University of Notre Dame. ND’s procurement department literally sits in the ‘future state’ of that first eProcurement initiative, operating as Vaibhav notes “more efficiently, with a fast order-to-requisition cycle and much more data [to leverage].” At the same time, it is also in the early stages of other initiatives and has large opportunities before it. For 2011, technology is one top priority with a Concur Travel & Expense solution set to go live campus-wide in July. Vaibhav believes that the data captured by the T&E solution will help the team identify new sourcing opportunities.

Sourcing, as it has in years past, remains another top focus for the ND team in 2011. With many of the low-hanging categories already tackled, the challenge for Notre Dame’s procurement team is and will be to branch out into new areas by forming new or better relationships with the different department heads so that they can become involved earlier in the process where they can add value and bring cost savings to the university. [Sidebar: For those less familiar with the procurement landscape in the higher education industry, most university departments operate like independent business units do within a corporation – with distinct budgets and full control over them. At most universities, procurement organizations lack a mandate and the different university departments have to be convinced of the full value that procurement can deliver for them. ]

As with many procurement departments in higher education, ND also works very closely with the office of sustainability. A few recent successes include:

• Executing a campus-wide contract with Office Depot to ship its goods in a “box free” way using paper bags and reusable totes instead
• Running reverse auctions for paper and janitorial supplies that blended savings and CSR goals in determining which suppliers were awarded the final contracts
• Signing contract with Zipcar that reduces the number of cars on campus by serving as an on-campus alternative transportation option
• Negotiating with an office supplies supplier to strategically price the higher content recycled paper below the lower content

Notre Dame’s procurement department is part of the finance division and reports to the Assistant Controller who is also responsible for accounts payable and payroll. The finance division reports to the Executive Vice President of the university whose top procurement performance metric is the percentage of spend that the procurement department manages (love it!). The team also tracks contract savings and a variety of operational metrics for eProcurement. Despite a Business Objects data warehouse, one of the team’s biggest challenges is to improve the metric calculation process which is somewhat burdensome at this point. That said, the team is realizing value from its Spend Analysis and plans to further enhance the solution in the future.  With that in place, the Notre Dame procurement squad can count on another great season ahead.

CPO Rising would like to thank Vaibhav for sharing the ND procurement story on these pages.

Tagged in: Case Study, Chief Procurement Officer, CPO, CPOs on the Rise