Procurement Items
1. Promotional and Apparel Purchases (B&N): There has been much confusion since earlier this spring related to the resale of department or organization specific merchandise on campus for either fundraising or marketing purposed. It came to our attention that various groups were purchasing items from retailers off campus and then setting up online or in person stores to then sell these items to students, employees and/or the public. Immediately this raised issues as it violated our contract with B&N who has the exclusive rights to sell such items on the Clemson campus. However, it also opened a whole can of worms involving licensing and policy vs contract communication. In short, we are working to share details on campus that will hopefully give very clear guidance on this front. Something like the “disbursement grid” but for these types or promotional items will point folks to when you have to use a certain supplier or when you have an option to use someone, as well we when you can’t use a certain vehicle to purchase items. At the same time, B&N is working on a process to offer the ability for folks to customize such items that they can quickly turn around and sell that will be the ideal case for everyone. Standing up this process is taking longer than we hoped, and we’ve been waiting to communicate specific details about this until that process is in place as it will answer a lot of the questions folks will have. Look for more info on this in the next few weeks.
2. P-Card Administrator Change: Hopefully everyone is aware we have a new P-Card Coordinator. Your areas should be directing all P-Card related questions to Katie Jennings (knjenni@clemson.edu). Katie is responsible for all day-to-day P-Card related functions (increase requests, mcc blocks/unblocks, etc). To support campus further, Claire Chapman is the official P-Card Administrator and will be charged with owning the overall program so she can help make policy decisions and strategically support the P-Card program. Continue to use Concur for all your P-Card needs as first step on transactional matters, but know Katie is available to help beyond that.
3. FEDEX Discussion: For discussion at meeting
Concur/Travel & Expense Items
1. Concur User Interface Update: Coming this Fall, Concur will make some updates to the Travel booking functionality. These changes will make booking travel easier to navigate and more user-friendly. 2. Travel Requests: Doing Travel Requests is required by policy, but currently we are noticing folks are not flipping Approved Requests into Expense Reports. Rather they do a Request and then kind of start from scratch on an Expense Report making it more work than it need be. So, we are exploring options in Concur that would flip approved travel Requests into Expense Reports automatically making the expensing process easier for users as well as ensuring that they attach the Request to the report.
3. Approver Escalation: Approval of reports seems to be the number one issue we are seeing in the system. As such we are looking to turn on a Concur feature so Requests and Expense Reports continue to flow through the system and not get “stuck” with an approver. The escalation process is something waiting on an approver to approve would go to their supervisor (as noted in HR) for THEIR approval after so many days. Looking for feedback, concerns, the right timing, etc… for this before we turn this on.
4. Reminder Emails: Tied into the escalation, we also want to turn on reminder emails to help users with their expenses and approvals. We are currently testing this email functionality and hope to roll it out along with approver escalation. This was not turned on because of initial complaints about too many notices.
5. Travel Allowances/Per Diems: Concur is making some changes to this process, that aside from approvers not approving things, is the number one complaint of users doing expense reports in Concur. We don’t have all the details yet but will be putting out training updates and share news when these changes will take place. This is great news.
6. P-Card Training: Katie and Claire are going to be reaching out to Business Officers in the next few weeks to schedule a few training sessions. We want to review and discuss cardholder and liaison processes in Concur as it applies to requests and expenses, and touch on p-card policy and what’s allowed/not allowed.
7. Communication Coming: We are planning to finalize a few of the changes noted above and share a communication with campus in the coming weeks – both to review the first full year of using Concur as well as highlighting changes that are coming.
