By Jenni Tonkin
Procurement and Business Services
To continually improve our services and better meet the needs of our customers, Procurement and Business Services has been working on several new initiatives for 2017 that will enhance and streamline the purchasing and payment process by making it easier to do business while helping you stretch your research and support dollars further. While we will have plenty more details to share on each of these initiatives as we roll them out, the following provides an overview of some of the enhancements you will be seeing soon:
Inbound freight services
Procurement has engaged with Vantage Point Logistics (VPL), a third-party logistics company for inbound freight services. Inbound freight encompasses the shipping process and costs for delivering the products you order. The key objective of this program is to reduce the costs of inbound freight by directing suppliers to use our competitive Clemson University freight contract for “freight added” purchase orders. This contract service will also eliminate multiple transportation carriers being on campus making deliveries to colleges, departments and docks. This will not apply to those contracts where freight is included in pricing (e.g. Fisher, VWR, Staples, etc.) but rather on any other purchase where you are currently paying your supplier for a freight or S&H charge. Details regarding Inbound Freight Services can be found on our website.
Expected mid-February 2017
PayPaw
Through a Clemson Lean Event, campus indicated a need to improve the invoicing process. We have been testing a new process in buyWays with pilot groups and are finalizing changes to that process that will simplify the way campus processes invoices for PO’s. We heard loud and clear that you want more e-Invoice suppliers (those invoices that show up automatically in the system and do not require manual intervention to create, enter and process). This new process provides a way for more manual invoices to be directly entered into buyWays without requisitioners or invoice handlers having to intervene, ultimately ensuring invoices are paid promptly while allowing you to spend time on important tasks rather than tracking down and processing invoices. Through this process, all PO invoices will be routed to a single address on campus and our partner Ricoh will use technology to upload the invoices directly into buyWays. We have a few more details to tie up and then much training to provide so we can roll this out, but we see this as a potential game changer for the procurement process at Clemson. To learn more about PayPaw, click here.
Expected July 2017
WORKS P-Card system
Bank of America offers an online software solution for managing our P‐Card transactions. The system helps Clemson manage the P-Card program using a web-based platform that provides greater transparency and flexibility for P-Card holders. One example of possible benefit is allowing for charges to be reconciled directly through the system at the time a charge is made. Once the transactions are reconciled, the data is loaded to PeopleSoft through an automated daily process which ultimately eliminates much of the “waste” identified in the current process. This system also potentially allows for P-Card receipts to be uploaded to the system so that they do not have to be stored in file cabinets. We are in the early stages of implementing a solution with the WORKS platform, but if it is even half of what it promises to be, this will be the biggest change to the P-Card program since it was first implemented at Clemson pre-2000.
Expected March 2017
