Beau Jimmerson, chief procurement officer for UNC-Chapel Hill, jokes that his department buys “dead bodies, basketballs and everything in between.” Jimmerson says that the role of procurement at Carolina is fascinating because of the enormity and diversity of the campus’s needs.
“We own a hotel,” he says. “We have a power plant, health care research and major Division I athletics. Because of that range, we purchase everything that you can imagine and more.”
Procurement’s main functions include contracting with vendors; running the request for proposal (RFP) process; placing business with contractors; finalizing the contracting with vendors and suppliers; and managing accounts payable, payment cards, travel cards and e-procurement catalogs that employees use to purchase standardized items.
To ensure that the department drives performance and operations, Jimmerson and his team monitor metrics, using standard operational metrics and, more importantly, customer service metrics.
Procurement’s operational metrics include the total amount of dollars spent — about $1.2 billion through Jimmerson’s group — as well as the number of vendors and the way they are paid, whether through a contract, purchase order or independent contractor invoice. Procurement also tracks the number of personnel with a University purchasing card (P-Card), which qualified University employees can use to pay for goods or services that cost up to $5,000.
Jimmerson considers customer service metrics to be the most important measure of departmental success.
“Our customers, who are Carolina employees making purchases, don’t care that I have vendors who offer dry erase markers,” he says. “They just want to get a pack of markers quickly without going through layers of bureaucracy.”
When Jimmerson arrived at UNC-Chapel Hill, one of the top metrics was requests in the system. He notes that it is not an effective metric because not all requests are created equal. During Jimmerson’s tenure, procurement metrics have changed from just measuring the volume of requisitions in the system to more value-driven factors.
“If somebody is looking to build a lab to do blood analysis for childhood cancer, that’s much more involved than someone ordering a pack of markers,” he says.
Procurement addressed this issue by establishing a robust P-Card program so that purchases under $5,000 can be done directly by a staffer instead of putting in a requisition. In addition, Procurement has secured preferred pricing from a network of suppliers and vendors which UNC-Chapel Hill staff are encouraged to use.
“People don’t want to come to procurement all the time; they just want what they need to be productive for their job,” says Jimmerson. “If you don’t have metrics that align with that, it doesn’t work out very well.”
When discussing customer service, or value-driven, metrics, Jimmerson uses the example of biomedical waste disposal. Previously, various departments and schools were using different vendors for their biomedical waste removal. After aggregating this data, Procurement staff negotiated a lower price with one vendor. When a new campus lab needed waste disposal, Procurement called the vendor and had them begin service the next week.
“That ease is what we’re going for,” says Jimmerson. “I don’t need to rebid or spec jobs like this. I just need to turn our customers on to our grouping of suppliers and vendors.” Jimmerson’s advice to other departments looking to optimize their performance and/or customer support by using metrics revolves around the question, “Am I measuring things that are important to the outcomes of my customer?” He notes that it is easy to measure how many people go to a movie theater but what is more important is how many come back to that theater.
“You need to draw a straight line between your choice of metrics and what your customers care about,” says Jimmerson. “If you ask yourself that question, you may eliminate some metrics and add others.”