Office focuses on purchasing power

by Quentin Roach

Roach

n January, the Office of Purchasing and Auxiliary Operations celebrated its first anniversary. A relatively short tenure in the lifespan of the University perhaps, but in our first 12 months we have laid the groundwork for a number of goals that I am confident will position the University for continued success in the future.

Since the creation of our office through the merger of the former office of procurement services with those of auxiliary operations, we have emphasized three main goals.

The first is to emphasize the value to the University--and the savings to individual departments--of our economic clout when we coordinate our purchases of supplies, equipment, and services. With annual budgeted expenditures of about $468 million, the University carries a significant amount of influence with suppliers, giving us the opportunity to ensure that we get the best prices and the best service possible.

For many common products and services, we have already done the groundwork to ensure that your needs can be met in a cost-effective and timely way. We have negotiated contracts with suppliers and made sure that University regulations and policies have been properly followed. For supplies that we don't already have a contracted supplier for, we can work with departments to develop one.

Our second goal has been to continue to take advantage of the synergies available through the merger of the purchasing operations and auxiliary operations. While purchasing focuses on buying supplies directly from specific vendors, auxiliary operations focuses on our relationships with outside vendors who are under contract to manage components of the University. These include the bookstores, dining services, and others.

Both require skills in managing contracts and the supply chain, and both rely on similar sets of financial data, reports, and systems. We hope to finish the full integration of the two components in the next 60 to 90 days.

And our third goal has been to take better advantage of the technology available to us to communicate our services with the University community as well as to streamline many of the functions performed by our office. We hope to make many of our services available through our Web site. And, through a newly developed intranet, we hope to be able to offer more information about the suppliers that University departments can tap into as they plan for their needs.

According to the old saying, there is strength in numbers. And while generally not applied to the goals and objectives of University budgeting, the idea behind the truism--that the more people work together, the more they can accomplish--is at the heart of our goals at the Office of Purchasing and Auxiliary Operations.

By better communicating the services we offer, we hope to improve not just the bottom line, but the ability for all of us to do our jobs better and more efficiently.

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Quentin Roach is director of Purchasing & Auxiliary Operations for the University.

This column is one of an occasional series on administrative issues at the University.

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