Spending is going to become a little easier for faculty, staff and administration going forward at Colorado Mesa University (CMU).
The university is launching a new e-procurement system called Source 360.
“The idea is that we’ve got a couple of pretty heavy suppliers. Office supplies would be a good example of that, where Staples is our office supply vendor. This is going to help consolidate all of that activity through this one portal, which is going to give us greater visibility into the spend around campus,” CMU Accounts Payable Manager Brian Davis said.
Before the new system, individuals such as professors largely had to buy items using a credit card, which put more responsibility on them and created more administrative work to track the purchase, which largely had to be tracked manually.
The university has price agreements with certain vendors, although sometimes CMU spends more than the agreed upon amount. In this case, changing to the new system would help cut down on the spending outside that agreement and save the campus overall.
“We recognized that we’d like to have a system that helped integrate everything that we purchased for campus. I think we just wanted to bring us to a more current standard of how to buy for an institution this size,” CMU Purchasing Manager Suzanne Ellinwood said.
The Source360 project was started in 2019. Currently, the project is moving from testing to production and with the help of a pilot group, the new system will roll out for campus in late March and early April.
This new system will not affect textbooks, which are instead handled through the school store. One of the biggest areas impacted would be facilities maintenance.
“If [people buying with the school] want to make an order, this system is going to help you take it from the very infancy of your order all the way through to the payments, so it creates that electronic solution that everybody needs to work with now […] and we want to make sure that we’re kind of keeping up with the industry standards that are used within higher ed,” Davis said.
According to their website, Source360 is a consultant partner that provides “implementation expertise for business-driven technology solutions that streamline workflow processes, improve productivity and maximize return on your technology investment.”
Source360 has the goal to make things easier for businesses and universities are a part of that. Some of the services they will help with are Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Process Management, Adobe Reader Extensions, Workspace and a custom application to serve a web-based dashboard.
“A single repository of new ideas gathered, processed and stored independent of geography dramatically increases the amount of information available to make a decision on the viability and marketability of new inventions as well as formulate university policies and seek funding for future growth,” Source360 said on their website.
