School Procurement Management
Wholeskool makes school procurement simple, quick, transparent, and accountable.
We understand your challenges. We understand your challenges.
Schools are constantly buying things. For the basics of teaching, schools have a constant inflow of classroom supplies: stationery, paper, craft materials, and teaching aids. Beyond this, schools must also continuously acquire science lab materials, equipment for music and
sports, dance costumes, stage props, and many other special items.
Schools frequently make expensive investments too: classroom or office furniture; computers, laptops, tablets, or other devices; interactive whiteboards and other educational technology; air conditioning units or systems; and even cars, vans, and other costly necessities. Furthermore, schools must purchase things for their infrastructural upkeep and development: cleaning supplies, maintenance materials, and equipment, lights and fans, paint, or even heavy-duty construction material.
Procurement is, therefore, a large part of any school’s outgoing expenses, but school managers are not procurement experts. Getting good rates and deals, efficient bulk orders, timely deliveries, quality supplies, proper stocking, and on-time payments are all complex, time-consuming tasks. It can also be difficult to determine whether a requisitioned item is really needed, how much of something should be bought, or what to spend on something.
There is a lot that can go wrong in school procurement. Things can be bought too expensively, the wrong items can be purchased, and low-quality goods may be received. School employees with the task of managing procurement or ordering materials may have a vested interest in showing inflated quotations or ordering excessive quantities.
School managers often try to intervene by personally checking requisitions and signing purchase orders, but this is an inefficient, unreliable, and time-consuming method of managing procurement. The school manager’s time is diverted from education, and yetwastage continues, money is lost, and quality remains questionable.
We understand your challenges.
Schools are constantly buying things. For the basics of teaching, schools have a constant inflow of classroom supplies: stationery, paper, craft materials, and teaching aids. Beyond this, schools must also continuously acquire science lab materials, equipment for music and
sports, dance costumes, stage props, and many other special items.
Schools frequently make expensive investments too: classroom or office furniture; computers, laptops, tablets, or other devices; interactive whiteboards and other educational technology; air conditioning units or systems; and even cars, vans, and other costly necessities. Furthermore, schools must purchase things for their infrastructural upkeep and development: cleaning supplies, maintenance materials, and equipment, lights and fans, paint, or even heavy-duty construction material.
Procurement is, therefore, a large part of any school’s outgoing expenses, but school managers are not procurement experts. Getting good rates and deals, efficient bulk orders, timely deliveries, quality supplies, proper stocking, and on-time payments are all complex, time-consuming tasks. It can also be difficult to determine whether a requisitioned item is really needed, how much of something should be bought, or what to spend on something.
There is a lot that can go wrong in school procurement. Things can be bought too expensively, the wrong items can be purchased, and low-quality goods may be received. School employees with the task of managing procurement or ordering materials may have a vested interest in showing inflated quotations or ordering excessive quantities.
School managers often try to intervene by personally checking requisitions and signing purchase orders, but this is an inefficient, unreliable, and time-consuming method of managing procurement. The school manager’s time is diverted from education, and yetwastage continues, money is lost, and quality remains questionable.
How can Wholeskool’s Procurement Management Module Help?
Wholeskool makes school procurement simple, quick, transparent, and accountable. At the simplest level, the system allows teachers, principals, and employees in need of supplies to place orders, those entrusted to check and approve those supplies to do so, and those in charge of carrying out the procurement to get rates, have them audited and approved, and deliver supplies.
Beyond this, Wholeskool allows your school to handle complexities in the procurement process. If one order has to be fulfilled by multiple vendors, if some material categories are to be ordered within a budget formulated according to a per-pupil ratio, if multiple auditors are supposed to verify rates of different commodities on a probabilistic-sample basis, or if any other unique procurement-related scenario arises, Wholeskool can smoothly facilitate your school’s needs without involving Management’s time.
Budgets are an important part of keeping procurement transparent and guarding against over-ordering, while also empowering those in need of procuring items to do so independently. Without budgeting, procurement tends to become a matter of “those with the loudest voice receive”: the more assertive school administrator might seek more than really necessary, while the more timid will refrain from requesting even things that would be worthwhile investments because they are afraid to ask.
Wholeskool makes it easy to manage procurement budgets. These can be set as absolute amounts of money or material quantities in particular time frames for any campus, department, or subunit of your school system. Any number of budgets are possible for commodity groups or individual commodities. When a budget is confirmed and approved, the relevant users can keep ordering within their budget without further approval having to be sought.
Particular multi-commodity budgets for special one-off needs are also possible, for example, a budget for a particular event, or a budget for a particular infrastructural project (see Wholeskool’s Construction Module to understand this better).
Wholeskool also allows an innovative, school-specific method of setting budgets. With basic data on students and classes – which can be gathered through no effort to the school via integration with the school’s existing ERP/MIS – budgets can be set using this data. For example, a school can be allowed to order classroom chairs up to the number of new students lus 5% extra, or a policy could be set that up to Rs. 50 of craft material per pupil can be bought per week in Pre-Primary.
Wholeskool budgets also enable school managers to completely delegate the tasks of raising, approving, and receiving requirements, without needing to monitor or approve these things directly. This is because after the constraints are set up according to the school’s needs, the monitoring and enforcement is done by the system itself, so that human intervention is not required. (Of course, if there is some special or exceptional need, Wholeskool ensures that the school manager retains the right to override the policy or approve out-of-budget requirements.)
Thanks to seamless integration with Wholeskool’s Inventory Management System, Wholeskool takes care of the entire hassle of the end-to-end lifecycle of a commodity in your school. Learn about Wholeskool’s Inventory Management System to understand how live monitoring of stocks by Wholeskool can further enhance the procurement budgeting process, and how it can take care of receiving, storing, moving, replacing, and selling items of all kinds.