The University
Founded in 1971 and located in central Virginia, Liberty is a liberal arts institution with 16 colleges and schools and offers programs in fields such as education, counseling, religion, law, aviation, cinematic arts, business, and more. Part of the CUSA Conference, Liberty fields 20 NCAA Division I athletic teams and 40+ Club Sports teams, offering an exceptional college sports experience. With a combined resident and online enrollment of more than 100,000 students, Liberty University (LU) is one of the largest academic institutions in the world, and one of the fastest growing.
The challenge
“It’s really like running a small city,” says Americus Gill about the challenges faced by LU. “In procurement we provide a central function supply efficient systems and services to customers across the campus.” With LU growing at such a fast pace, Gill emphasizes the challenges of ensuring adequate management controls and integrating services within the procurement environment. For years, LU struggled to manage procurement tasks with a combination of manual processes, spreadsheets, and information from disparate sources such as ERP systems. “It was very disjointed,” says Gill.
The solution
“What JAGGAER has allowed us to do is to integrate all the data across functional lines of procurement. That’s been very helpful,” says Gill. JAGGAER allows LU to make data-driven decisions to create efficiencies for its customer base aligned with the supplier base, while addressing some of the current market challenges. “I summarize the benefits of implementing JAGGAER with three words: data, data and data! We are now able to harness the power of business intelligence to innovate, increasingly through artificial intelligence. In addition, we are saving time and resources through autonomous purchasing, which enables us to focus on strategic decisions in procurement.”
The future
“JAGGAER in one word? Innovation. Some of our key business objectives now involve deciding how to use the data we have been able to capture to find further efficiencies and devise innovative strategies in terms of commodity management and business relationships,” says Gill.
