School district achieves $154K in cost savings by optimizing office and classroom supplies

An innovative school district in the Houston Metro area, Spring Branch Independent School District was able to achieve $154K in cost savings by choosing to purchase office and classroom supplies with Amazon Business through the competitively-solicited contract available through OMNIA Partners, Public Sector. The new office and classroom supplies purchasing process has saved both time and money for the teachers who can easily search hundreds of millions of products on Amazon Business, select items, route to the school secretary for purchase and receive the items quickly with Business Prime.

THE CHALLENGE

High cost of office supplies and tedious procurement processes

Spring Branch Independent School District (Spring Branch ISD) has 35,000 students across 47 schools in the Houston Metro Area. The district is primarily funded through the State of Texas and therefore subject to the state’s regulation on spend. According to Spring Branch ISD, if it goes over $50k in spend during the year, it’s required to go through a solicitation, which can take up to 12 weeks. When buying curriculum materials, 12 weeks means teachers may not get supplies in time for effective learning.

Spring Branch ISD is regarded as a high performing school district and is always looking for ways to find efficiencies to better support its stakeholders-students, staff and faculty. The district said it has to adjust to unexpected changes to the budget, such as roll-back in property tax rates and renovation of school buildings.

THE OPPORTUNITY

Saving costs while improving the teacher experience

Spring Branch ISD engaged with Amazon Business to perform a thorough analysis of historical spend and realized there was up to 30% savings opportunity within the office and classroom supplies category. This savings opportunity would not only allow the district to invest back into the learning mission, but at the same time help evolve from current tedious processes used for district spending. They decided to work with Amazon

Business to reduce costs and streamline the purchasing experience for the teachers. It was an easy decision to choose Amazon Business, due to its features supporting requirements for education procurement. According to Rick Gay, Director of Procurement Services at Spring Branch ISD, being part of OMNIA Partners, Public Sector cooperative allowed Spring Branch ISD to leverage existing contracts that are compliant with certain state and district purchasing guidelines. The ability to integrate with their Tyler Munis eProcurement software means that Spring Branch ISD didn’t have to uplift and rebuild their procurement back-end systems. Lastly, the ability to get multiple quotes and the ability to make the purchase decisions based on price, delivery speed and availability, allows the district to make the right purchasing decision.

THE SOLUTION

Updating the purchasing process to save time and money

Teachers are now using this intuitive integration into their purchasing system. Using Single Sign-On, they are able to log in using their existing eProcurement system credentials. From there they’re able to shop from hundreds of millions of products, many

of which are commonly used in education. When ordering supplies, Guided Buying recommends preferred products and the orders are routed to administrative staff for approval before submitting an order.

The procurement department is satisfied with the implementation, cost savings and the additional fast shipping achieved with Business Prime.

• The district is reducing costs on classroom supplies purchases
• Teachers can easily search and order supplies for their unique needs
• Spring Branch ISD has a detailed picture of spending patterns using Spend Visibility

Spring Branch ISD also received the 2019 National Purchasing Institute Achievement of Excellence in Procurement Award, given to professional purchasing organizations demonstrating excellence in innovation, productivity, eProcurement leadership, training and certification.

“With Amazon Business, we have new opportunities to cut costs. We can potentially return $154k annually to the classroom. This allows us to do better for our students, and that’s what we care most about. For every dollar we save, that’s a dollar returned to the classroom.” – Rick Gay, Director of Procurement Services, Spring Branch Independent School District

Public agencies can utilize the competitively-solicited contract with Amazon Business through OMNIA Partners, Public Sector. For more information, visit Amazon Business or request additional information.