Central Community College – Buying with confidence

Moving from old to new software solutions, re-aligning processes, changing work methods, training staff, and managing expectations, all require embracing new ways of working and letting go of the past. And at CCC, that is exactly the challenge they decided to embrace.

Central Community College (CCC) successfully used Ellucian Purchase to transform its purchasing processes. And while the implementation of Ellucian Purchase saved CCC time, money, and resources, the purchasing team continued to explore ways to improve the path to purchasing even further.

“More savings, faster turnaround times and transparent access to real-time data gave us the confidence to continue to push forwards” comments Carmen Taylor, Purchasing Manager at Central Community College, “we decided to deploy Ellucian Experience. Our old dashboard was serving us well and we loved that the whole campus was able to benefit, but we wanted better” continues Carmen.

As a college, we strive for better, and we demand the same from our purchasing system. We heard about Experience Purchase Cards at Ellucian Live in April, and we knew right away we wanted to be part of the early adoption group.”.

It was the pandemic that proved the strongest catalyst to highlight the inadequacies of CCC’s manual procurement processes. Implementation occurred in April and May 2020, just as COVID-19 began to shut the campus down. “Sign-off happened prior to the pandemic,” explained Carmen Taylor, Purchasing Manager for Central Community College. “It was a curse because it
just had to work, there was no other option, and it was a blessing because, after
go-live, we were completely virtual. That was something that would never have been
possible without procurement modernization.”

Central Community College’s introduction to Ellucian Experience came at the perfect time. The team were looking for new ways to reduce costs and how to cut staff workloads associated with approval tasks, enabling people some time back in their day.

The legacy dashboards made it difficult for staff to conveniently access and to quickly action tasks. In contrast, Ellucian’s SaaS based Experience environment slashed the time and money CCC were spending on internal IT system maintenance, and importantly released precious IT time, and allowed the whole team to focus on making the buying journey more seamless for faculty and staff.

Ellucian Experience creates a centralized, secure dashboard. And it’s delivered in a way that works best for the institution and its users,” continues Richard Forrest, Chief Product Officer, ESM Solutions, “it’s easy to access Ellucian Purchase from Ellucian Experience, eliminating the need for users to toggle between systems, something we all find creates user fatigue.”

CCC now provides curated purchasing content that streamlines daily tasks for faculty and staff. The previous service at the College linked to external resources. Ellucian Experience allows all user interactions to take place within the cards themselves, alongside the other applications faculty and staff want to see. The Purchasing team found it seamless to deploy Ellucian Experience cards, with users enjoying the transformed dashboards with just the right service features designed to support their work..

Ellucian Purchase Experience cards transform the purchase experience by enabling CCC to organize and personalize buying experiences. Despite Central Community College’s use of Ellucian Experience being still relatively new, the benefits are already adding up. Collaboration between Finance and Purchasing is easier with the visibility of budget information right at the time users are making spend decisions. Knowledge that will help everyone at the College to focus the right resources to advance education.

“Ellucian Experience and Ellucian Purchase integrated with our Ellucian Colleague ERP, have transformed procurement operations” commented Carmen.