SupplyLogic: Driving UMass’s Procurement Optimization
There are two sides of marketing – the campaigns created to reach customers and the innovative designs and logistics to get those campaigns into market timely and efficiently - this is where Phil Schoonmaker, CEO, SupplyLogic explains that it is vital for organizations to look to a provider such as SupplyLogic for its services. “The only way to truly optimize marketing execution is to partner with an expert like SupplyLogic. Given the events of the last couple of years especially, more and more companies are coming to this realization. Organizations are frustrated by supply chain disruptions, disorganized data, inadequate technology, and most recently a pretty dramatic reduction of internal staff to manage these categories,” says Schoonmaker.
Working With the University of Massachusetts
“Anytime an organization changes the way that it manages an important aspect of their business, one of the biggest challenges is the transition from the status quo to the new model. We are working with David Cho, Chief Procurement Officer at UMass and the stakeholders across the university system on implementing a phased approach so that this new model, while innovative, is not disruptive. As a company, we are dedicated to a client-first approach and continually seek and incorporate feedback, in this case from all the campuses to ensure we are exceeding expectations,” explains Schoonmaker.
SupplyLogic began its partnership with the university in early 2021 and at the most fundamental level is helping the university operate as one centralized entity rather than individual campuses. This includes an optimized and smaller supplier panel; previously UMass worked with over 400 suppliers which made it very difficult to aggregate spend to get the best pricing. The new includes a mutually agreed-upon set of suppliers with priority on MA-based businesses, diversity, and sustainability. The technology including a unified portal for marketing operations supports each campus’s own brand and needs.
SupplyLogic’s managed services enable organizations to do more, with less, by providing an innovative, data-driven, transparent, and truly optimized solution. This ‘do more, with less’ mindset and capability helps partners like UMass achieve their goals quickly.
Providing UMass With Visibility and Localization
“Prior to this partnership, UMass had hundreds of people throughout the campuses buying prints from over 400 suppliers. As you might imagine, that's a difficult model to manage, especially from a data perspective. Going forward, we've created a unified procurement system across all the campuses and a fully integrated technology suite, which provides total transparency to the university down to the skew and user level. We track our savings against this data,” explains Schoonmaker.
Being a public institution that cares deeply about its relationship with local suppliers, SupplyLogic has been supporting the university for many years, “we are proud to not only maintain these relationships but enhance them. We have over a hundred clients in every possible vertical, and this provides us with a tremendous aggregate spend, which these local suppliers now have access to by being included in the supplier panel. So, it's a win-win for them as well as us and the university,” concludes Schoonmaker.
SupplyLogic’s managed services provide UMass with an innovative, data-driven, transparent, and centralized marketing supply chain, so that procurement organizations can better serve campuses and stakeholders. With this model, UMass can ‘do more, with less’. This mindset and capability enables UMass to gain back time, resources and money, shifting its focus to higher priority initiatives for students and the community.
