Strategic Sourcing Snapshot

Strategic Sourcing is an effort that promotes all UC locations to come together to negotiate systemwide contracts that benefit all UC purchasers. The commodity team model encourages participation from each site and requires suppliers to respond to the needs of the total University community. It involves data driven analysis, consolidated purchases, a review of total cost beyond the sticker price, targeted Supplier partnerships and increased collaboration between departments and UC locations. Here are some recent Strategic Sourcing accomplishments.

Professional Services

  • Card Program: UC has signed an agreement with US Bank to continue payment card programs for procurement and travel. The card program provides approximately $10M in incentive benefits to the UC each year.

Information Technology

  • End User Devices: UC recommended contract awards to Dell, Lenovo and HP which will provide over $600,000 in annual benefits, improve access to purchase data and standardize pricing formulas across UC locations.

Life Sciences

  • Life Technologies: UC signed a multi-year agreement with Life Technologies providing over $1m/year in benefit. The agreement introduces early payment terms, ultimately reduces the cost of freight to $0 and caps annual price increases at 3%.

Facilities & Maintenance

  • The Million Lamp Challenge: The Million Lamp Challenge brings together California State Universities, Foundation for California Community Colleges, CA Department of General Services and the California Lighting Technology Center to encourage the use of LED technology. The team held a planning session with UCOP marketing in December and will present the initiative to the Presidents Global Climate Leadership Council on February 8th.

Construction

  • Construction Data Handover:  The Construction COE is positioned to deliver critical information to a wide variety of stakeholders and provide strategic purchasing insights by standardizing the data handover process of equipment and asset information on new construction projects. The collection of this data during construction (including quantity, type, purchase date, warranty and expected lifespan of selected assets) will save about $0.60/sq. ft. in building assessments (approx. $180K for large projects). The use of the data in operations will save $0.24/sq. ft. year over year in system interoperability (upwards of $30MM/year according to a recent NIST study). The ability to structure purchasing agreements and collect rebates in a predictive manner (sometimes years in advance) will bring untold additional savings to our existing procurement programs and are yet to be explored.