In an effort to further align with the University of Utah’s Impact 2030 strategic plan, the Procurement and Accounts Payable team in Financial Services recently implemented a digital solution to increase speed, accuracy and transparency in the procurement-to-payment process.
The departments implemented software from Jaggaer to help eliminate the need for the manual methods that had been used for decades. The processes often involved paper invoices and fax machines, and had relied on workflows that were prone to human error.
“We had no search functionality,” said Manager of Operations, Service and Process Improvement Heather Holley. “If a department needed to check whether an invoice was paid or not, we had to manually dig through records. Everything was paper-based and there was zero transparency.”
The new digital system helps to eliminate a lot of the bottlenecks that previously existed in the process. It emphasizes user empowerment, ease of adoption, purchasing controls, increased contract spend, faster invoicing timelines and the ability to scale across departments.
“[The] punchout catalogs were a game-changer,” said Holley. “They let us guide spend while making it easier to buy what they need – with preapproval for all orders – and the added benefit of efficiency.”
Procurement and AP also gained digital invoice capture (OCR) to reduce manual entry and reduce AP backlog, while centralizing contract storage and automating clause management, helping to mitigate legal risk.
Overall, implementing the new system has led to a dramatic reduction in processing time – in some cases, it now takes minutes when it used to take days. It also streamlined the purchasing process for campus partners through UShop, improved compliance and legal oversight and helped increase strategic purchasing decision making because orders are approved at the time of purchase.
This successful implementation was recently featured on Jaggaer’s website – you can read their story here.
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