The Situation:
Pocono Mountain School District looked at their procurement spend and realized that it was “leaving money on the table” with a paper procurement process. The District’s paper procurement processes had few reporting mechanisms and minimal spend controls.
Pocono Mountain saw changes to its procurement process as an “opportunity to save more time and money.” An electronic procurement process would provide countless opportunities to stop inefficient practices such as: spending “hundreds of tiresome hours counting inventory” to provide auditors with end of the year numbers, and having staff purchase from “whatever catalogs were just sitting on their desks.”
The Results:
Since 2008, ESM Solutions has saved Pocono Mountain significant administrative time and money. With eSchoolMall, the District has:
• Reduced the administrative time it takes to source and procure items.
• Managed their vendor contracts.
• Ensured accountability and auditability.
• Accessed detailed spend data and management information.
• Developed strategic vendor relationships.
Each year the District finds new ways to leverage eSchoolMall. “With today’s focus on stretching school budgets, eSchoolMall helps find school districts additional dollars.” For example, the District captured one year of its spending data with its largest vendor and used that information to negotiate an additional 5% discount.
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The Situation:
The Richmond County Board of Education, located in Augusta, GA, was in need of an electronic procurement program that allowed their administration and their schools to evolve with advances in procurement. They also desired a way to move to an electronic process for all purchases that required sealed bids, to facilitate its “e-commerce way of doing business” and to automate district-wide purchasing and bidding.
The Results:
By implementing easyBid, Richmond County transitioned from a paper-based bidding procedure to a fully automated electronic bidding process. ESM Solutions’ easyPurchase allowed Richmond County Schools to present the awarded bid items as a catalog to all users in the district, so orders could be placed against them. easyPurchase was integrated with the Board of Education’s existing SunGard Bi-Tech fund accounting software, the Integrated Financial and Administrative Solution (IFAS). By capturing all transactional information and communicating with the general ledger, easyPurchase satisfied the most critical aspects of financial management for Richmond County.
In doing all of the above, ESM Solutions allowed the Richmond County Board of Education to eliminate the excessive amounts of paper associated with the current sealed bid process, significantly improve its accuracy process, eliminate the cost of postage, and reduce the amount of staff time required to manage the process.
The Situation:
Manual procurement processes, few controls on spend, and too much paper was what plaged Bill Lyle, P.E., C.P.M., Purchasing Director of Delaware Valley College, a private, co-educational four-year college enrolling approximately 2,000 undergraduate students, located in Doylestown, PA. We assessed the situation of the organization and implemented ESM Solutions products to work seamlessly with their Datatel® Colleague® financial accounting system.
The Results:
The technology is now available for all of the faculty at Delaware Valley who needs it, with a link right on the College’s homepage. Procurement processes are automated with no re-keying. Spend is funneled to the College’s established vendors and contracts, managed by the DelVal Purchasing Department, and there is not a sheet of paper throughout the process.
The Situation:
Prior to the ESM Solutions implementation, Tompkins utilized a procurement system that didn’t meet expectations. The buying community didn’t have visibility of their orders as they went through the process and the procurement office didn’t have a good handle on corporate spend. The bank’s goal was to manage spend across autonomous offices and branches, as well as control multiple inventory locations to avoid duplicate purchases.
The Results:
easyPurchase™ Enterprise was implemented to manage catalogs, contracts, vendors and business processes and ESM Solutions Warehouse was utilized to present a consolidated view of inventory across the Tompkins organization.