Modern Procurement, Integrated with WVEIS

Wyoming County Schools: Modern, Integrated Procurement – Powered by ESM

Wyoming County Schools have a vision: to maintain “an efficient and effective system where employees have all needed resources and children are happy while they are learning.”

But when Grant Campbell became the new Treasurer of the Wyoming County Schools, he quickly realized that the procurement process was neither efficient nor effective.

Located in Wyoming County, West Virginia, Wyoming County Schools include 14 elementary, middle, and high schools serving some 4,000 students across the county. As part of the broader West Virginia Department of Education, Wyoming County Schools, like all other districts in the state, use WVEIS as their Finance solution. But their procurement approach was outdated and filled with inefficient, paper-based processes.

Today, the manual process starts with a paper-based form outlining the purchase request. The form makes its way across multiple people’s desks before reaching Campbell for approval. Once approved, an administrator enters the details from the paper-based form into WVEIS to create the purchase order.

But many times, details were lost during the manual entry process because it was simply too time-consuming to enter them all into the system. Even worse, on occasion, paper-based requests would go missing entirely.

“There is a river right beside here and they often joke that [the paper form] must have fallen in the river because it’s not here,” said Campbell.

Seeking solutions
Campbell, who previously worked at neighboring Fayette County Schools, knew he needed to add a new solution to modernize the procurement process yet also harness the underlying financial structures from the WEVIS system. He used ESM Purchase integrated with WVEIS in his prior role, experienced the benefits it provided, and said it was an easy decision to select and implement it in Wyoming County Schools. “Being part of that system, and ultimately being the one who ran it until I left, showed me that [ESM Purchase] is just the easy, no-brainer solution that we needed here too,” said Campbell.

Integrating ESM Purchase with WVEIS
ESM Purchase will help Wyoming County Schools eliminate their paper-based request forms, reducing manual processes and speeding up approvals. Through the standard integration with WVEIS, Campbell and his team will gain a full picture of the order request without having to click into an attachment to see additional details. And, because of the integration between ESM Purchase and WVEIS, purchase orders generate automatically, with all the information from the initial request intact.

The new solution will also expand access to the procurement process. Today, many teachers make their purchase requests through secretaries, which causes a bottleneck in the process. With ESM Purchase, teachers can now easily make requests themselves, streamlining the process so they can receive their orders faster. Campbell anticipates that this self-service capability will allow them to grow from approximately 20 requestors today to over 600 requesters in the future, without adding administrative overhead. Campbell sees the self-service capability as a win for teachers as they will be able to get the supplies they need faster.

Maintaining accurate, up-to-date pricing
ESM Purchase will also keep item pricing accurate. Many teachers and administrators still use old catalogs with outdated pricing when making their purchase requests. And because their requests may reflect outdated costs, it causes rework for the team to update the price to the correct amount. In contrast, ESM Purchase always includes the most up-to-date, accurate pricing for each item. The teacher or administrator can simply select the item they want to request and ESM Purchase automatically populates the correct price.

Looking ahead, Campbell is excited about the efficiency gains he and his team will realize as a result of implementing ESM Purchase with integration to WVEIS. He’s also excited about exploring integrated PCard capabilities to help reduce the number of checks the team issues so that procurement operations can run even more smoothly.

To learn more about how ESM Purchase integrated with WVEIS (or other K-12 ERP solutions) can help your institution, please CONTACT US