Procurement savings
What we’ve completed
The Procurement team identified a number of practices and processes we could improve, then validated these findings with a third-party review from KPMG. The reviews included the following recommendations:
- Increasing compliance with procurement policies and procedures
- Negotiating and receiving competitive pricing
- Reducing duplicated procurement activities
- Reduce purchasing demand
Please see this page for our upcoming initiatives.
Why these changes are vital
Every dollar we save in procurement and duplicated administrative activities is one dollar less that will need to come from labour savings through layoffs and staff reductions. To minimize the impact on our labour force, we must commit to completing procurement activities differently.
How we can achieve savings
The university has guidelines, processes and procedures in place for procurement, travel, and hospitality. With our current organizational model, exception processes and workarounds have been accepted in procurement. For example, you may prefer to work with suppliers or contractors you’re familiar with, rather than using preferred suppliers we have agreements with or following the Contracting for Services Procedure. Workarounds like these have led to extraordinary spending and inconsistent practices.
To achieve the savings we need, it is critical that the entire university community changes its approach to procurement to benefit the university now and into the future. To accomplish this, the Procurement team is redesigning guidelines, processes and procedures as part of the Service Excellence Transformation (SET). We are committed to streamlining processes, and making them easy to follow and understand. We also need leaders, faculty and staff to commit to following these shared guidelines and prevent the development of future workarounds.
In addition, a more centralized administrative model will allow us to correct inefficiencies and improve the speed of communication and decision-making. For example, nearly 300 people currently play a role in the review of travel, expense and PER expense claims which includes reviewing line item details, attaching physical receipts and overseeing claims. This duplication of effort needs to be reduced across the institution. In the future, some of this work will move to central review, which will streamline processes and reduce costs by minimizing the administrative requirements in faculties and departments, and ultimately reduce our administrative and infrastructure spend.
One of SET’s main objectives is to continue to provide high-quality services with fewer staff members. And though fewer people will complete transactional activities, more centralized activities will allow us to leverage expertise, reduce redundancies and increase collaboration. Faculties and units will receive specialized support in a new culture of service excellence.
Lastly, the pandemic has afforded us significant cost savings in travel and procurement. Our senior executives have agreed to lead by example to maintain the momentum of these savings after the pandemic by adjusting travel and procurement spending in their areas.