As many school districts have learned the hard way, just because you order online doesn’t mean you’re getting the best price. It doesn’t mean you can electronically track every step in the procurement process. It also doesn’t mean your school district isn’t experiencing errors and delays from manual and redundant data entry. If all you’re doing is ordering online, then your school district is still missing out on the cost and time savings that ESM Solutions’ Procurement Automation delivers.
Because they’re normally a small component of a larger general ledger package, online procurement modules are not as comprehensive as a solution designed specifically for electronic procurement automation. ESM Solutions’ entire focus is on purchasing and sourcing solutions for schools. Over 2,900 educational entities currently utilize ESM Solutions online procurement solutions because they recognize the value ESM Solutions adds to their general ledger and procurement processes. Since ESM Solutions was designed from the ground up for ease of use and the unique needs of schools, they enable you to deploy best practices in online procurement at all levels of your district — including the teacher’s desktop — without having to teach your entire staff how to log into your general ledger system.
Workflow is just one small aspect of effective electronic procurement. In addition to supporting a workflow that will reflect your district’s business rules, ESM Solutions offers proven purchasing and sourcing processes, online access to your approved suppliers, rapid time to benefit and a compelling return on investment - typically six months or less.
This is an excellent time to implement a procurement automation solution from ESM Solutions. ESM Solutions extend the life of your existing general ledger system while immediately saving your district time and money. When you upgrade to a new GL, it’s easy to integrate your existing ESM Solutions investment with the new GL system, with little or no change to the user interface and your established processes.
Although ordering directly from supplier websites is a form of online procurement, you can only realize the full benefits of online procurement if that experience is integrated with your general ledger system. That way you can eliminate the need for multiple sign-on’s, centralize the management of account codes for purchases, and control your district’s spend across all suppliers. Online procurement in its purest and most beneficial form is what ESM Solutions is all about.
ESM Solutions’ textbook management solutions help you better control your textbook inventory, thereby reducing the need to purchase additional textbooks. Knowing what you have on hand and where textbooks exist within your district are important first steps in controlling textbook spend. As new textbook adoptions occur, textbook costs can skyrocket from $500,000 to over $1,000,000 annually for a large district. ESM Solutions not only makes it easy to buy textbooks by providing visibility to your approved textbook supplier websites, but ESM Solutions also enables you to control costs by helping you to reuse books that you already have on-hand and to purchase used books.
Supplier websites offer distinct benefits, including detailed product descriptions, advanced search capabilities, delivery lead times and configuration. But there’s a downside to buying directly from supplier websites. For one, the purchase is not integrated with your general ledger. For another, the supplier website will require your users to maintain a unique sign-on. ESM Solutions’ easyPurchase solution eliminates those problems with dynamic punch-out which enables a controlled visit to supplier websites. Once you choose the supplier sites that you want to be visible to your staff, the buying is done in easyPurchase, rather than through the supplier’s website, in a manner that’s integrated with your business rules. Thanks to dynamic punch-out, a single sign-on completes the transaction. As for purchasing cards, they do reduce costs on the payment side of the process. Their disadvantage is that they do nothing to control spend across the organization. With ESM Solutions, users buy only from approved suppliers with the payment process streamlined by electronic purchase orders and electronic receipts.
ESM Solutions’ easyPurchase solution integrates with the general ledger systems used by school districts. By interfacing with your general ledger system, ESM Solutions enables you to institute the best practices in procurement automation that we’ve developed and refined for school districts across the country. Our approach is to personalize your solution using your own business rules in a manner that mirrors the existing processes in your district. Our Professional Services consultants can review your current processes and show you how ESM Solutions can save you and your district significant time and money.
ESM Solutions offers a complete Sourcing Solutions Suite featuring two sealed bidding tools - one for line item bids and one for catalog discount bids. Our sourcing solutions include easyQuote - an electronic RFQ tool that’s ideal when your business rules require evidence of competition - and easyProject, which has been designed for RFP/RFI creation, communication and award. ESM Solutions differs from many sealed bidding systems on the market today. Our approach is to offer a complete electronic capability that can create a sealed bid, quote or request and communicate electronically with your supplier community while facilitating online awards. Our solutions communicate with each other, making awarded bids and quotes visible as electronic catalogs and purchase requisitions within the easyPurchase solution.
Our experience has shown that the best approach is to focus on your most effective supplier relationships. Why? The simple reason is that having too many suppliers can dilute your buying power. Our Professional Services consultants can help you identify which suppliers currently receive the bulk of your district’s spend. By starting with these suppliers, typically one per major product category, you will have greater control over your district’s spend. We can always add additional suppliers at your request as you expand your product categories or as the number of suppliers in each category increases.
ESM Solutions has and will continue to meet the requirements for Payment Card Industry (PCI) Compliance as determined by the PCI Guidelines. As noted by the PCI Standards Council, Compliance is not a one-time event but an ongoing process. The Council "is constantly working to monitor threats and improve industry's means of dealing with them, through enhancements to PCI Security Standards."
The advantages of delivering software solutions as a service over the web far outweigh any disadvantages. As a software service provider, our solutions are available 24/7 with only a web browser and Internet access required. We manage both the hosting and the hardware. Our customers don’t have to load software or buy hardware. All updates to the software are released in previously announced off-hours maintenance timeframes and are made immediately available to all customers. Our systems setting screens, available to your authorized personnel, allow our solutions to be personalized to meet your needs without the burden of custom development. This enables your technical staff to focus on the technology and solutions you use to educate your students.
ESM Solutions offers something that few other procurement automation companies offer - compelling return on investment, typically in six months or less. Through partnerships with innovative public financing, we can also offer deferred payments out of the current fiscal year and packages that link payment to benefit.
When it comes to Return on Investment, ESM Solutions is at the head of its class. That’s due in large part to a dramatic and immediate effect on hard dollar costs such as paper, forms, envelopes and stamps. Additional ROI comes from better utilization of staff time, compliance with existing contracts and supplier relationships, and the improved oversight and accountability that help school districts meet their mandated reporting requirements.
More than 2,000 bidding events have been conducted by ESM Solutions users over the past several years. During that time, we’ve spoken with hundreds of suppliers, including most of the national suppliers that do business with schools. These are suppliers who have participated in sealed bids and paid a percentage bid fee. All the suppliers we’ve talked to understand and appreciate the substantial savings that ESM Solutions makes possible for them. The value they gain far outweighs the bid fees they pay. If you know of specific suppliers with questions, we’d be happy to contact them and explain how electronic sealed bidding works over the Web.
One of the many benefits of using easyPurchase is the ability to make any supplier catalog visible to your buying constituency. The catalogs can come directly from suppliers or from awarded bids and quotes, from warehouse inventory, from state and/or local contracts and from buying cooperatives. Even when the fees charged by your local cooperative are figured in, the savings to your buyers in any specific category can be significant. With ESM Solutions, you have complete control over suppliers catalog presentation.
ESM Solutions has developed its procurement automation solutions in direct partnership with school districts. We know from experience - in schools ranging in size from under 1,000 students to over 100,000 students - that ESM Solutions products are easy to deploy, easy to learn and easy to use. Keep in mind that you control the depth and breadth of deployment. Not everyone in your district has to be a user.
Numerous districts we work with deploy ESM Solutions products selectively, for example only to the business office or only to the building level (where administrators purchase for the teachers). But we also work with districts that deploy our solutions to the teacher’s desktop. The level of deployment is completely under your control and can be changed by you at any time.
ESM Solutions works with thousands of national, regional and local suppliers who do business with school districts. With easyPurchase, we can import supplier records from your general ledger system so you can continue purchasing from your local suppliers without interruption when the system goes live. Furthermore, our sourcing solutions give you immediate access to all the suppliers in our database for purposes of a sealed bid, quote or request.
Any purchase order can be printed for filing purposes or to mail to a supplier. And all your transactional data remains available to you online for three years. During that time, you also have online access to all the reports that come with our solutions.
You can go live with ESM Solutions products in as little as five business days. Even in top 100 school districts, our complete procurement automation suite has deployed in under six months. Because we’re a Software as a Service provider (SaaS), you can access our solutions via the web without having to load any software. You don’t need to maintain version control of the software. You don’t need to buy hardware. And only minimal staff is needed to administer the system. ESM Solutions manages all the supplier relationships. We host the software and maintain the system. Plus, we provide phone and e-mail help desk support.
Over the years, we’ve worked with districts that are extremely centralized, extremely de-centralized and everything in between. No matter how your district business processes are structured, it’s easy to deploy our procurement automation solutions for control at either the district or building level. At the same time, we provide visibility to supplier contracts that enable you to take full advantage of the combined buying power of all the schools in your district. In other words, schools can keep control of their processes even as they save substantial time and money.
Procurement automation solutions are a means to save time and money. It’s all about the ability to make the most of what you have so that more resources can reach the classroom. We’ll be happy to show you how you can maintain your district’s unique character and still save substantial time and money.
Click the link labeled “Not Registered?“ above the “User Name“ in to top right area of the screen and then follow the instructions displayed at the top of each page.
It should only take a few minutes to complete the online registration form. Once completed the registration request is received and we will then process it accordingly.
Every sourcing opportunity will have its own unique set of terms and conditions. It is important to read the Terms and Conditions section on each sourcing event carefully, as this area will contain information relative to any fees that may apply.
ESM Solutions supports customers nationwide with internet based procurement and sourcing events tailored specifically for the following organizations: School Districts, Government Agencies, Higher Education Institutions and Private Sector Companies.
Yes, our applications allow you to continue to work directly with your customers as you do today. In the event that you are invited to participate in a sourcing event that you are not interested in you can simply decline the invitation.
When you register you are presented with a listing of classifications that best describe the type of business or service that you provide. All customers can search for you by these classifications and have the opportunity to invite you to a sourcing event based on these classifications. In addition, ESM Solutions will soon be offering additional value added services such as advertisement opportunities to the supplier community.
Yes, ESM Solutions has two ways in which supplier catalogs can be presented to customers. The first method is called a hosted catalog. The supplier will supply ESM Solutions with a file of all items they wish to have presented to their customers. Included in this file is a detailed product description, price and graphical image (if available). The supplier is permitted to update this information on a quarterly basis. The second method is called a dynamic link punch out. In this scenario the supplier and ESM Solutions work together to create a real-time link between our applications. The user begins in ESM Solutions and then connects to the supplier website for searching and shopping cart creation. Upon checkout, the shopping cart is transferred real time back to ESM Solutions where it is routed for approval. Once a purchase order is created it is transmitted back to the supplier using standard CXML technology.