Grand Valley State University (GVSU) in Michigan consistently ranks among the top colleges in the Midwest and across the country. U.S. News & World Report lists GVSU as one of the nation’s most innovative universities.
That success comes as GVSU focuses on addressing massive increases in online, hybrid, and adult students. “Our online and hybrid course offerings exploded in recent years,” says Heather White, GVSU’s assistant director of procurement services. “We’ve seen a major increase in adult learners as well.”
To meet the needs of today’s students in a competitive higher education environment, GVSU adopted a digital transformation strategy that includes increased visibility into spend management to support sourcing and procurement priorities and unify operations.
Expanded supplier diversity.
GVSU can now move past reactively managing spend and initiate strategic alignment with school priorities. An important one is tracking and expanding supplier diversity. “It’s one of the biggest advantages of having everything unified,” explains White. GVSU has a Workday Strategic Sourcing portal where suppliers can indicate their minority classification during the registration process. “This lets us get more information up front so we can track and report on it,” adds White.
Holding this information allows GVSU to ensure it is supporting its institutional policies. “It’s good business to include suppliers of all ownership classifications and level the playing field to earn business at our school,” White says.
We have streamlined and automated a lot of what we do. That is huge for us.
Assistant Director of Procurement Services
Increased visibility into contracts and calendars.
GVSU manages contracts with easier access to data and better reporting because everything is centralized and visible. “We didn’t have a contract management system before Workday,” White says.
Managers can review which vendors are best suited for a particular spend category and whether they can consolidate orders. They also use the team chat feature to discuss priorities and work together on projects instead of relying on back-and-forth emails. “I see a lot of our departments collaborating to ensure things are good to go on contracts,” White says.
Workday has made it easier to plan for higher volumes of spend during the seasonality of the academic year. Estimated spend versus actual spend, project status, and approvals are easier to track, including what’s on hold or canceled. Managers can also review reports on estimated versus recognized savings.
Our contract management system is a lot more visible for our team and the legal team. That’s allowed us to be more strategic.
Assistant Director of Procurement Services
Time saved and accuracy gained with AI.
Staff members run sourcing events, streamline supplier onboarding, manage contracts, and analyze performance with Workday Spend Management. Employees use AI capabilities to complete tasks such as supplier invoice OCR. “Automating redundant tasks lets our buyers focus on strategic projects rather than reviewing requisitions or sending emails,” White says. One example is the expansion of GVSU’s supplier diversity program, which is about choosing historically underrepresented businesses. Additionally, GVSU has expanded its study abroad program. “Our travel program manager has more time to find new places and programs for our students to study,” White says.
The university has also freed up time processing requisitions with Workday Procurement. Its requisition-to-order cycle time took three days because the procurement office’s seven employees had to manually review and enter data to support GVSU’s 4,000 faculty and staff members. “Now that takes a few hours since requisitions automatically turn into purchase orders,” White says. Automation also means audits are more up-to-date. Online purchases with the university credit card, for example, would happen before GVSU had a chance to approve them. “Now, through automation in our audit process, we can deny ineligible purchases ahead of time instead of catching them after the fact,” White says.
GVSU also increased the creation of RFPs by about 150 percent each month because it no longer needs to send and receive numerous emails to gather information. “Overall, it’s been a huge success,” White says. “We’ll continue working closely with Workday to solve today’s challenges and plan for the future.”