PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 24, No. 20, May 5, 2005

Facilities and Services focuses on service, efficiency

By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor
217-244-1072; slforres@uiuc.edu

Click photo to enlarge Photo by Kwame Ross More savings Facilities and Services’ staff members are exploring ways to reduce overhead costs for office supplies in fiscal year ’06. A new online catalog called OfBiz, which will include all of Stores’ inventory, will be available this summer, replacing the current online ordering system called Webcat.

Facilities and Services is exploring new ways of doing business that are paying off for the campus and the university.

The initial catalyst for these changes was the reorganization that consolidated 30 major business units on campus, creating F&S in July 2003, in an effort to reduce administrative expenses by pooling and sharing resources.

However, F&S staff members have augmented those savings by maximizing Banner’s reporting capabilities and using the information they extract to analyze operations, further reduce costs and improve service.

“We’ve tried to bring a business focus across the organization,” said Jack Dempsey, F&S executive director. “We’re looking at every element of our businesses and asking ourselves, ‘Do we have to do this to support the mission of the university?’ If we do, then we need to make it work well and efficiently. If not, then we may need to discontinue doing it.”

“It gave me a chance to focus on operations,” said George Hess, director of Campus Stores, Mail and Receiving, about the administrative consolidation that formed the Facilities and Services’ Shared Administrative Services Division. “By sharing people and functions, I have a whole cadre of talented staff (members) who can share their knowledge and services with me. Instead of trying to hire a particular kind of (information technology) staff to support the business, I can share staff with this huge organization, and there’s tremendous savings in that.”

And F&S staff members are exploring ways to help the university’s bottom line by helping their customers save money too.

Click photo to enlarge Photo by Kwame Ross Customer service Jennifer Kilhoffer, right, a data processing technician, assists a customer in the Computer Center at Campus Stores, Mail and Receiving. A preferred-vendor pricing program – coupled with the discount for educational institutions – has saved campus customers more than $176,000 on computer purchases so far this fiscal year. Facilities and Services hope to increase those savings by raising awareness of the program.

This fiscal year, F&S has helped its customers on the Urbana campus attain more than $176,000 in cash discounts on their computer purchases. Hess expects that figure to reach $250,000 by fiscal year-end on June 30.

“Anyone who orders a computer manufactured by one of our three strategic partner companies – Apple Computer, Dell Computer or Hewlett-Packard – gets the educational pricing plus a 2 percent discount,” Hess said. “They would not have gotten that last year, even from the vendors directly.”

However, it is estimated that 800 computer purchases on campus did not go through Stores’ Computer Center last fiscal year, costing the university about $75,000 in lost cash incentives and users about $26,000 in discounts, Hess said. He is exploring strategies for steering those transactions into the computer center next year.

This fiscal year, Campus Mail is expected to reap – and pass on to its campus customers – savings of $75,000, attained through administrative cost reductions and using a cash-discount sorting house to obtain a 15 percent discount on first-class postage for 1-, 2- and 3-ounce letters.

This summer, a new electronic catalog, OfBiz, is scheduled to go online, replacing Webcat, Campus Stores’ existing online catalog. OfBiz will be more user-friendly than its predecessor, which is a text-based system that dates back to the early 1990s. Web-savvy shoppers will notice that OfBiz operates similar to online vendors such as Amazon.com, with shopping carts, a check-out process and lots of merchandise photos. OfBiz will contain everything that Campus Stores stocks, including office supplies, and customers will be able to place orders by “punching out” directly to the Web sites of strategic partners such as Dell, Office Max and Fisher Scientific.

One of Stores’ goals is to decrease overhead costs which will allow mark-up reductions on everything, an initiative that is expected to save customers $100,000 during the course of the next fiscal year. Mark-ups range from the discounts on computers to a maximum of about 16 percent on items like office supplies. Stores’ staff members have adopted a simple operational strategy – low cost, rapid delivery – that is displayed on every box that leaves their facilities.

Pam Voitik, director of Campus Services Division, is reviewing operations in the printing department for cost-containment possibilities and to ascertain the technologies and skills the unit must have to support customer needs. Car pool services at the Urbana and Chicago campuses also are being examined to determine if the two campuses could work collaboratively to save money.

Implementation of the Banner system has resulted in changes in the division’s business processes because staff members now can extract information, particularly financial data, from the data warehouse that was not available with preceding systems, Dempsey said.

Mike Maquissee, associate director for business operations, and his staff have created a set of uniform financial reports with differing levels of detail for specific stakeholders, such as the executive director and operational managers, to help them keep abreast of performance and improve decision-making. They have shared their strategies and the reports they have developed with other campus and university administrators and the software vendor, who indicated interest in conducting a case study on the division and its success with Banner.

The transition to Banner has produced positive results for F&S, Dempsey said, perhaps because staff members chose to embrace the new system and figure out how to exploit its capabilities.

“We may not balance the university’s budget,” Hess said, about the savings F&S has generated this year. “However, the fact is that if we continue to make these sorts of changes, next year we may be able to look back and say we saved the campus $400,000 through discounts, and that has to help the bottom line.”

Jeff Oberg, director of the shared administrative services division, concurred: “It frees up resources. The pot of money is only so big, and the more your costs escalate, the less money you have to do things like research and teaching. We’re freeing up more money for faculty (members) to do what they need to do.”

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