Insights from NACUBO 2024

The NACUBO Annual Meeting is a highlight of the year, bringing together finance/procurement executives and practitioners to share strategies, trade insights, and learn from each other. Throughout the event, attendees discovered new ways to elevate their impact through leadership, innovation, and collaboration. 

This year, the ESM team joined our strategic partner, Ellucian, at their stand where we had the opportunity to connect with attendees and learn about the procurement challenges they are facing. And while the institutions they represented varied widely, three challenges emerged consistently throughout our conversations.

Ensuring the institutional supply chain is stable, sustainable, reliable, and in alignment with institutional values is top of mind for the procurement office. But as budgets tighten, balancing sustainability, diversity, and environmental goals, while staying within financial parameters, can be challenging. 

Making matters worse, many procurement offices are dealing with disparate, disconnected systems, making it difficult – if not impossible – to gain a holistic view of budgets and spending. And without a clear picture of available budget, people across campus lack the confidence to complete their purchases.

Many institutions we talked with shared that managing budgets and purchase requests is overwhelming for busy stakeholders. With multiple systems capturing pertinent information, gathering accurate and reliable spend and budget data can take days, weeks, or even months, and often involves a lot of internal run-around. 

Without insight into the impact of buying decisions, it’s challenging for stakeholders to keep budgets on track, turning buying into a free-for-all.

Many purchasing systems are built for administrative users, not for the people who are buying goods and services. Users become frustrated because they can’t find what they need, they don’t know which vendors the institution prefers to use, and if they actually have the budget needed to make the purchase. 

In addition, because systems are disconnected, users can’t see the status of their purchase to know if it was approved or declined. Therefore, they end up wasting time chasing people internally, either to approve their purchase or to process refunds when they sidestep the process by using their own credit card. 

ESM is transforming the way people in higher education access the resources they need to power education. Through rich procurement capabilities and seamless integration, ESM enables institutions to:

Further, ESM delivers pre-built, certified integration with Ellucian Banner® and Ellucian Colleague® using the Ellucian Ethos platform. The rich, out-of-the-box integration enables the consistent and reliable exchange of data in real-time which provides finance leaders with better visibility into budgets and spend – and better control over it, too.