Spotlight on $avings

Farmington BOE saves $12,000 annually.

Farmington BOE is saving $12,000 annually simply by emailing purchase orders to vendors from BudgetSense. "This was just one of many immediate surprises that resulted from the implementation," claims BOE Business Manager, Mike Ryan.

Prior to BudgetSense, Farmington’s baseline purchasing process was to create a multi-part paper PO, send it inter-district mail to collect all the necessary manual approvals, and finally book the encumbrance against the budget at the central office. Next, a staff person would spend a couple of hours every day bursting the multi-part forms, filing copies, returning copies to departments, folding vendor copies, inserting them into and sealing envelopes, running the envelopes through the postage machine, and finally mailing or faxing them to vendors.

With BudgetSense in place, Farmington made the decision to take advantage of its electronic purchasing processes to put an end to all that paper shuffling and the delays it inevitably created. Now, everything is handled online; they create requisitions, send them through an approval process, generate purchase orders, and send them to vendors, all without a single piece of paper.

Before going live with the new process, Farmington surveyed their vendors and received almost 99% agreement to accept e-mailed purchase orders. With vendor acceptance in hand, Mike’s team immediately began to save time; no more labor intensive manual handling and mailing of POs. And, Farmington no longer has to purchase PO forms, envelopes, or postage. Even the fax telephone bills are dramatically reduced.

“The decision to email POs in order to save us time and money really made a ton of sense, once we discussed it as a team and got past the idea of doing it differently from our past practice. We are also experiencing efficiencies in other workflow areas that we are anxious to quantify,” states Mike.

Nice Job, Farmington BOE!.......Way to go in the pursuit of peak performance!

Have you noticed significant savings that you would like to share in the $avings Spotlight? To share your story with the rest of the UniFund client community, contact us at $avings@unifundonline.com, so we can add your experiences to a future edition of uniNews.