Next-Gen Procurement Initiative

Providing an enhanced procurement experience

As an early outcome of the university's ongoing Budget Transformation initiative — and as a demonstrable example of our shared commitment to enhanced operational excellence at K-State — the university is launching a Next-Gen Procurement initiative to set the stage for streamlined purchasing, contracting and payment activities for users across the institution. The initiative will:

  • Provide users the ability to manage bids, contracts, purchase orders and invoices within a single, intuitive cloud-based system — one that will also include a universitywide marketplace for common goods and services.
    • The marketplace will provide a guided user experience with access to more than 25 university-contracted suppliers.
    • Additionally, it will support a more expedient procurement for most low-dollar commodities due to an estimated 50% reduction in administrative touchpoints.
  • Strategically migrate financial forms currently sitting across multiple disparate platforms into two existing university systems, enhancing user efficiencies.
  • More fully leverage our core financial information system, or FIS, by strengthening our purchase order and commitment accounting processes, capital asset management and construction-in-progress tracking to enhance data integrity, improve reporting accuracy, and support long-term scalability.

Taken together, these efforts will result in:

  • Increased user efficiency — creating more time to focus on other core responsibilities.
  • Simplified workflows for all faculty and staff who engage in procurement activities.
  • A more efficient, consolidated tech suite, as the initiative will allow us to decommission six university systems overall.
  • Enhanced transparency within our overall institutional purchasing process.
Learn more about the Project Advisory Committee members who guide this initiative, as well as the Implementation Team driving it forward.
View the timeline for the launch of Unimarket, the source-to-pay platform that will include the universitywide marketplace, as well as the timeline for existing form migrations.

Communications