This marks our first procurement tip for this fiscal year! We have some information to share with you that we think you will find useful and interesting.
Reminder of our Amazon Smile Account
During our Oct. 28, 2020 procurement refresher, we announced that Amazon Smile was available via our Amazon business account. When you shop on AmazonSmile, the AmazonSmile Foundation will donate 0.5% of the purchase price of eligible products to the Florida Polytechnic University Foundation.
It doesn’t appear that we have taken advantage of this amazing opportunity for our Foundation as much as we had hoped. Please take a minute to set this up on your Amazon business accounts as soon as possible, so we can continue to support our University!
You will need to visit smile.amazon.com and sign in with your business user name and password, you will then be prompted to select a charitable organization from Amazon’s list of eligible originations. The charity that we would like you to choose is Florida Polytechnic University Foundation. After choosing this charity, you can shop as usual through the Amazon Business site. Your charity preferences will be attached to your business profile. Click here for screen shots on how to set this up.
GovQuote
Need a second quote? Don’t know who to contact for one? Use GovQuote. It’s fast, it’s free, and it’s easy!
In the fall of 2019 (who can remember life before a pandemic?) we introduced a new quoting platform called GovQuote. Procurement held two training sessions on how to use the system. It looks like many of you signed up, but perhaps with the hustle and bustle of everyday life you have forgotten how to use GovQuote. No problem! We are here to help. If you would like another demonstration on how this system works, please reach out to Procurement. We would love to host another demonstration on this easy and fast second quote solution!
Savings report for fiscal year
Year after year, the Procurement Department works hard to ensure we are in compliance with state law, Board of Governors (BOG) regulations, and Florida Poly policy. It can be irritating when you are in serious need of a purchase order only to have Procurement kick it back to you for a second quote. It’s easy to lose sight of why we need to continuously shop the market for anything over $5,000. You might be excited to learn that we saved over $2.1 million dollars last fiscal year by leveraging second quotes, consortium savings, and piggyback agreements! Take a moment to pat yourselves on the back for your diligence to testing the market for University savings. This savings information is reported to the BOG every quarter, but we never thought to share this information before. We are going to share this information on a yearly basis from now on.
New procurement director
As many of you know, Treasa McLean rode off into the retirement sunset on June 30. We hired a new director of procurement, Andrea Cashell, who joined us on Aug. 2. Andrea comes to us from the University of Eastern Kentucky with a decade of procurement experience having served as their director of procurement. If you haven’t met her yet, please stop by and say hello. She is housed at Florida Poly South, but will make her rounds to the other campus locations as soon as she gets settled. We are so excited about the experience and background Andrea brings to the table!
As always, we are here to help! If you have any questions about any of this information, reach out to the Procurement Department.