Another school year is upon us in just a month or two (depending on where you live!). It's hard to believe and almost always sneaks up on us all.
Here are 3 things your ops/finance teams can do to make this new school year smooth sailing when it comes to the mad rush to purchase everything needed for the new year.
While you may know that an employee left the school, this elementary school was combined with the middle school building, and you changed the approval workflow with the finance team... you may not have shared that with your key suppliers!
We see this all the time, and it's a simple process to introduce a fix.
At the beginning of each quarter or semester (or RIGHT NOW), audit your top 10–15 suppliers for these common account structure changes and make the necessary updates. Your supplier rep will make the changes for you on your account they just need to know the most up to date info.
It will save everyone time, energy, money—and most importantly—frustration.
Seems obvious, right? But you should have a clearly documented place where new staff can learn about your preferred vendors, key contacts, internal approval processes.
AKA the "how do I buy something I need" source of truth. Don't take for granted that new, or often existing staff, know or remember.
Also, this is in addition to your organizational purchasing policy (not the same thing, let's face it very few people have read the whole purchasing policy and what you need is clear instructions, not a formal policy doc pasted somewhere). If you don’t have it, greener staff are asking their peers and then “learning” practices that might promote the wrong behaviors and contribute to overall resource misuse and administrative confusion.
How do you know if things are going well with your procurement operation?
If you don’t create KPIs, the void will naturally get filled with subjective opinions (“I like this supplier better,” “We are roughly on budget,” “We saved X on that order, isn’t that awesome?” etc.).
If you don't know where to start, put the work back on your suppliers—ask them to provide 3 metrics that they agree you both should be tracking and reviewing every 90 days that their best clients track religiously. Then pressure test whether those metrics are actually getting you the end results you are driving toward.
Back-to-school season is the perfect time to tighten up your procurement systems. A few proactive steps now can save a lot of headaches down the road—and set your team up for a smooth, successful school year.