As part of K-State’s Budget Transformation Initiative, Wildcat OneBuy is a new pay tool designed to make purchasing processes more convenient and efficient for faculty and staff. It is set to consolidate several older, outdated systems into one platform.
“It will have a centralized marketplace which provides an online shopping experience, and within that online marketplace we have 15 of our most frequently used suppliers for university purchases who we already have discounted contracts in place with,” Memory Buffington, assistant vice president to University and Shared Services Accounting and Procurement, said. “Think of it as Amazon for university business purchases, where faculty and staff can shop from approved suppliers, request purchases and track orders all in one place.”
Buffington said examples of suppliers that will be available on the marketplace include Dell, CDW, McKesson Medical and Fisher Scientific for laboratory equipment.
“This really represents a major step forward in trying to really modernize university operations and our university processes,” Buffington said. “Today, many of our departments across campus have very unique and siloed internal processes, and this is helping align business processes across the university, which creates better relationships with suppliers.”
The OneBuy platform is replacing seven separate tools that are used to complete transactions and contracts, Buffington said.
“Now all of that is going to happen from start to finish in one system,” she said. “This system will have the ability for suppliers who want to do business with the university to go in and … they will get notified of any opportunities to do business with the university through that same system.”
This month, a pilot group will train with the system, advancing the program into a testing stage. Buffington said almost every college within the university is represented in the pilot group.
“We understand that this is a pretty big change for the university administratively to go from the process that we’re doing now to this one-end system, and we thought that it was very important to have a pilot set up where we were targeting some of our high frequency users,” Buffington said. “We reached out to all of our college and administrative-level business officers across our campus and asked them to identify a department or departments in their area that would be a really good fit to test it out and help us refine the system.”
According to the Next-Gen Procurement timeline, the pilot groups will be in progress until December. The platform will go live after adjustments in February.
“Our hope is that this simplifies purchasing, helps increase transparency for departments, and it creates efficiency for the university, so that way faculty and staff who need to do these administrative purchasing processes can spend more of their time supporting students or doing research,” Buffington said.
