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SMU Staff Spotlight – Brian Cook

Since last summer, the Operational Excellence website has been featuring a series of staff spotlights: stories about staff members who’ve taken on new leadership roles since the implementation of OE2C and are helping bring more innovation and efficiency to campus operations. Read more SMU staff spotlights

Brian Cook is not only SMU’s RFP coordinator, but also an entrepreneur. He earned a B.B.A. in finance and accounting from Stephen F. Austin State University and, while completing his M.B.A. there, he launched his own music entertainment business.

His entrepreneurial experience also serves him in his current role as a purchasing agent for SMU and as the procurement card administrator and coordinator for all requests for proposal (RFPs) for the University. “I am responsible for approving purchase requisitions in various spending categories, ordering and maintaining the many credit cards held and used by SMU faculty and staff for business and travel expenses, and overseeing the University’s annual RFP calendar,” said Cook. “I also help lead or support any RFP processes completed by the University in order to select preferred or exclusive vendors for various goods and services.”

In his work to support the selection of exclusive vendors, Cook makes a major contribution to the work of the Operational Excellence initiative. “I have learned how important good planning is and that the most effective way to achieve maximum efficiency is to develop strong processes and procedures built on feedback from all parties involved,” he said.

Cook enjoys ensuring consistency in procurement operations and accurately reporting and tracking activity. “But my favorite part of my current position is getting to interact with many different SMU faculty and staff members who work in numerous different areas across campus,” said Cook. “I get to learn about their individual roles and work together with them and the University’s vendors to develop creative and efficient ways to meet their needs while helping to achieve the University’s overall goals.”

Although he only joined the SMU purchasing team in fall 2016, he has already scored several significant gains for the University, including overseeing the RFPs for security and parking services and for event services. “Both of these were very large undertakings that required many different areas and personnel across campus to work together,” said Cook. “They were only successful because of the strong precedent set by previous RFP initiatives related to OE2C prior to my joining the University. It is really cool to get to see the bottom line savings impact of the work that was put into these initiatives.”

Cook’s contributions to SMU’s bottom line are far from complete. “I hope to help streamline the SMU P-card process and create and maintain a central RFP calendar so that the University can ensure it is evaluating its vendors and contracts on a consistent and timely basis,” he said. “My goal is to help make SMU’s purchasing and procurement operations as smooth and efficient as possible.”

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Changes in Purchasing From Contract Savings Plan Result in Additional Annual Savings for SMU

Over the last two years, SMU’s Purchasing Department has been charged with saving the University millions of dollars. To date, purchasing initiatives have contributed $5.86 million in annual savings, $1.7 million of which came from the Contract Savings Plan, and the Purchasing Department is working diligently to keep that number growing.

“After final campus-wide budget changes to meet savings goals at the conclusion of the OE2C project, our commitment in Purchasing was to make sure University-wide contracts were in place to help departments realize budgetary savings and to continue to find new sources of savings,” said Shannon Brown, SMU’s Director of Purchasing. “The Purchasing Department sees our job as providing resources to help all departments stay within their budgets.”

The savings come from a variety of areas including printing, promotional items and event services. As different as each purchasing category is, the process for identifying savings is the same. “First we look across campus to see where expenditures are occurring in a particular category,” said Brown. “The primary vendors are identified, and specific products and services are classified.  Information from invoices provides a lot of detail that helps bring the spending pattern into focus.

“Once we see some common expenses, we put together a price sheet to be able to include in our bidding process with potential vendors. A committee of frequent purchasers in that particular category reviews responses from the vendors interested in establishing a campus-wide contract and makes decisions about exclusive contracts that lock in consistent savings for the SMU community.”

In many cases, the resulting contracts include vendors who have been doing business with various parts of the University in the past. In other instances, the process brings new vendors to campus who offer specialty services that best fit the needs of campus departments.

The structure of the Purchasing Department has also changed to help manage the ongoing savings identification. “Our buyers have become category managers with more in-depth knowledge about specific areas,” said Brown. “So when Cathy Heckman is working with a group on a print project, she can help the group understand the options between the full-service printer and the print-ready printer and find ways to save money. The category managers are trying to get people comfortable with that process.”

Occasionally a campus department will purchase from a vendor that is not a part of SMU’s exclusive contracts. To address these issues, Brown said, “We contact the department and let them know we have another company available, and suggest they get a quote from that vendor. Usually that process results in the department saving money. Recently, using one of the event rental exclusive providers delivered $1,200 in savings for just one event on campus. In other cases, Purchasing may quickly reach out to our vendors ourselves to get pricing to offer to the campus department as an alternative to help them with their budget management. The goal is to offer something that is better – whether better means less expensive, better service or a better long-term solution – and that’s what we should be offering.”

The work to identify additional savings in purchasing continues. “Upcoming initiatives include on-campus printing, mailing and shipping. We will also be reviewing our travel management to see if more savings are available, now that we have some consistent baseline data from Concur to share with vendors. We will also work with HR on choosing the vendor that will handle the Employee Recognition Program” said Brown.

If you have additional ideas about ways in which SMU could save money, please submit your ideas here.

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Operational Excellence: December 2017 – January 2018 News and Highlights

The major news in December was the conclusion of the 18-month Data Warehouse Initiative and the establishment of a new Data Governance model for SMU. The University is now on a path to consolidate and transform complex, unmatched data across campus into usable, consistent data that provides a trusted information source for analytics and visualization tools. Two Data Governance committees will continue the work begun by the initiative; five initial projects are planned, the first of which will begin this spring.

In January, two employees were featured as part of the continuing series of spotlights on staff members who’ve taken on new leadership roles since the implementation of OE2C operations. They were Curt Herridge, director of software applications in OIT, and Abby Kinney, IT category manager in Purchasing.

Featured News

An Update on Data Warehouse Work at SMU

SMU Staff Spotlight – Curt Herridge

SMU Staff Spotlight – Abby Kinney

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News Staff Spotlight

SMU Staff Spotlight – Abby Kinney

abby kinneySince last summer, the Operational Excellence website has been featuring a series of staff spotlights: stories about staff members who’ve taken on new leadership roles since the implementation of OE2C and are helping bring more innovation and efficiency to campus operations. Read more SMU staff spotlights

Abby Kinney has made a career out of efficient technology purchasing. During the shared services restructuring in 2015, she became the University’s IT category manager in the Purchasing Department, but her connection to SMU and coordinating technology purchases has a decades-long history.

“I graduated from SMU in 1986 with my BBS in Accounting and went to work with a regional investment securities firm as an analyst supporting the research group,” says Kinney. “I soon transitioned to helping with the purchase, installation and support of all their computers. I eventually moved to managing a team that supported the computers, phone systems and services, and data services for the main office and 42 branch offices.”

Kinney came back to SMU in February 1995 and started as a desktop support consultant as part of Project Pegasus, an initiative that issued desktop computers to all faculty and staff. “I completed my master’s in MIS in 1996,” she says. “I eventually became manager and then director for the User Services team and was responsible for buying computer technology for half of the University after the campus computer store closed in 2013.  During the OE2C project, I participated in the Purchasing Initiative, and when the possibility of centralizing technology purchasing came up, it was something I definitely wanted to be part of.”

In her current role, she purchases technology-related hardware for the entire campus (desktops, laptops, displays and accessories), tracks technology spending for the University and assists with RFPs for hardware, software and tech maintenance. Though she has moved from OIT to Purchasing, she still works closely with her former department.

“I have learned a lot about how the entire Purchasing team helps the campus with the procurement of the variety of goods and services the University uses, how the RFP process works, and how the IT procurement role can benefit the campus,” says Kinney. “The most significant advantage is the cost savings that we have been able to help SMU realize by purchasing the University standard computers in volume for the ongoing computer refresh process, saving more than $100,000 in FY17.”

Kinney says another key advantage of the structure is increased awareness about technology savings that helps individual departments spend their budgets wisely. “I get to continue working with everyone on campus to help them with their technology needs and ultimately help the University save money.”

As for challenges, the biggest one has been “keeping up with the demand, especially around fiscal year-end and the start of each semester,” she says. “Since moving to Purchasing, I now buy for the entire campus and the number of items I purchase each year has doubled, to more than 6000 items annually.”

Going forward, Kinney says there are many process improvements she would like to make in the technology purchasing process. “In partnership with OIT, I’d love to create a website with all purchasing information and Technology Fund eligibility details, create a web-based order form to help guide people through the ordering process, and provide more visibility to the purchaser on the status of an order in process.

“I’d also like to look more strategically at Technology purchases to see if SMU can realize any additional savings with software licensing and maintenance contracts. I’m proud of the cost savings we’ve established so far, and look forward to making them even better.”

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Staff Spotlight

SMU Staff Spotlight – Curt Herridge

Since last summer, the Operational Excellence website has been featuring a series of staff spotlights: stories about staff members who’ve taken on new leadership roles since the implementation of OE2C and are helping bring more innovation and efficiency to campus operations. Read more SMU staff spotlights

Curt Herridge loves to solve problems. “There is something special about finding a solution to a technical problem,” he says. Whether it is building a first-ever data mart for SMU, managing a system outage or saving the University time and eliminating paper usage, he is always up for the challenge.

Curt came to SMU in 2007 to help the University migrate to its current electronic imaging system, ImageNow (AdminImages). He moved from systems administration to team leadership the next year, completed his MBA at Cox in 2010, and was named director of data and integration services in early 2015. Then, when SMU restructured the Office of Information Technology (OIT) in 2015 as part of the OE2C initiative, Curt was promoted to director of software applications.

“In this role, I am responsible for the implementation, operations and maintenance of enterprise software like PeopleSoft (my.SMU, SMU financials); departmental applications in partnership with individual departments; website development and support; and database management,” he says. “The goal of this new structure was to try to organize all teams that support campus software applications into one department, thus streamlining methodologies.”

In their first two years of work, he and his software applications team have achieved significant results for SMU. “We estimate thousands of hours have been saved with the introduction of electronic payroll authorization forms, grounds use forms, additional new payroll forms and others,” says Curt. “We are now automating forms like the one for pre-tax parking deductions. To accomplish this, we partner with a department and move a paper-based form to something electronic. I think it’s truly awesome to save time (and paper!) with technology.”

Curt says his team also tested a method to build a data mart, which is basically a mini data warehouse, from scratch in conjunction with the Simmons CORE group (Center on Research & Evaluation). “The goal was to automate loading of data that had traditionally been moved around in a huge spreadsheet having literally hundreds of columns. We entered into this project with the knowledge that it was completely experimental, and it’s been exciting to see how the work has expanded the skillset of our team and increased our contribution to University research. Now we are working to address our capacity in order to build a data warehouse for SMU.”

Of course, challenges have occurred along the way. “We had a fairly substantial system outage in October 2015, which began on a Saturday,” he recalls. “But our newly formed leadership team was able to band together and perform a massive recovery operation. In fact, some of the practices we developed during that long week still stand us in good stead today.”

In the months to come, Curt and his team will expand the use of technology that is more mobile-friendly. “You may have noticed a change to my.SMU,” he says. “We will continue these critical changes over the next year.”

“We also heard loud and clear that Sitecore, the software that runs www.smu.edu, needs to offer more training and an easier way to make edits,” says Curt. “We have scheduled personalized clinics, updated documentation, and are working on a new set of templates designed to help the brand of SMU move forward.”

Curt says these problems are not easy to solve, but the challenges make the accomplishments even sweeter. “It requires us to have great teams, great partnerships with others on campus, and a willingness to do things differently than before,” he says. “I am proud of the progress we have been able to make together in our first two years, and I’m looking forward to continuing improvements for the campus in the coming year.”