Coordinated Purchasing Efforts
Iowa State University Procurement Services, along with the purchasing personnel at the University of Northern Iowa, University of Iowa, and the State of Iowa Department of Administrative Services, continually strive to leverage the state’s resources by not only coordinating efforts to reduce costs, but by strategizing and implementing best practices all while meeting Board and statutory objectives.
The purchasing personnel from all three institutions and the State of Iowa Department of Administrative Services meet regularly to discuss current contracts that are shared across the institutions and to identify potential new contracts that could be shared for the benefit of all three institutions. The goal is to increase joint purchasing to reduce costs through joint bids and to leverage the combined dollars spent to negotiate larger discounts that benefit all three institutions.
The three institutions recently worked together to develop a joint bid for temporary staffing support that resulted in a contract with Advance Services, Inc. The three institutions worked together to develop the bid specifications, to review responses to the bid, and to award the contract. Through coordinating efforts and leveraging the combined needs of all three institutions, a lower per hour rate for temporary workers and an early pay discount were negotiated resulting in a total savings of approximately $50,000 to $75,000 per year.
In addition to working together to develop joint bids, Procurement Services, the University of Northern Iowa, the University of Iowa, and the State of Iowa Department of Administrative Services also work with other purchasing consortiums to leverage their existing efforts. Recently, through a collaboration with the Big Ten Academic Alliance Purchasing Consortium, we were able to establish contracts for search firm services for all three institutions. Having pre-negotiated contracts in place removes the need to issue a bid to use a search firm when the university needs to hire a dean, director, vice president, or other executive level position and provides the same or better pricing than has been received in the past!
For more information about these and other existing contracts that are available for use, please check out our Contracts by Commodity Webpage.