Paul Tarnoff is the CEO of k-Purchase, a company of educators, technical and business experts who decided to create a no-cost purchasing solution so schools can invest more time and money in educating students.
K-12TD: What challenges do K-12 schools face when making purchasing decisions?
There’s a systemic, hidden cost that school districts face and they’re all under pressure to cute budgets, to get more out of less and everyone is complaining to school districts that they’re wasting so much. When it comes down to purchasing decisions it’s the process itself rather than the decision, I would say. There’s a systemic problem in the school districts that were targeting, they don’t have a full time purchasing manager, they’re smaller, and that makes up over two-thirds of the school districts. In small districts, the process of doing purchases falls on everyone in the school. Everyone who wants to buy something has to research it on their own; they fill out forms, they turn them in, and the forms get lost. Either people have more than one job, so the people approving it end up doing it at night with all these papers, and someone then has to take up purchase orders and send them, and the accounts payable people don’t know it’s arrived. It’s a very disjointed process spread out amongst everybody in the school district and as a result, no one really knows the hidden cost. If you take each step in that process and add it together it’s over two hours spent, which with the average wages, is over $80 per every purchase request. The challenges are that it’s disorganized, it’s very wasteful, it’s a lot of time spent by many people, and instead of teaching they’re doing things that they aren’t really trained for. There’s also a lack of control, accuracy and accountability with these disjointed processes.
K-12TD: How can a cloud-based platform such as k-Purchase help solve these challenges?
The way this can work is it is all cloud-based and it mirrors the way the school district’s process works ordinarily. So, someone just goes on a screen, types in what they want, they press a button, it’s routed right to the approver without any paper involved. The approver can look on the screen and quickly see all the things they have to approve, they press a button, they approve it, because it’s virtual in a sense. The orders go right to the vendors. When the orders arrive people can mark that it’s arrived. It goes to accounts payable. Instead of getting a bill that says “Oh, we ordered twelve things, but only ten arrived,” well now they know, whereas before they didn’t know. By automating the process and streamlining it and getting rid of paper, you reduce the time, in our experience, by 75%. When you add up those hours, it is up to being many thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars of wages that can be redirected to education.
K-12TD: What kind of impact will cloud-based purchasing platforms such as k-Purchase have on K-12 schools in the long run?
Schools’ money comes from the state. It’s all budgeted from the state. When you have a disjointed process, what happens is you lose controls and accountability and transparency. You also have paper. I was talking to school districts yesterday that have boxes of paper under stairs and under desks with all the purchase orders in them. So this way it’s all digital, it’s all online, no paper is needed. So they can trace an order when they go for audit. From the budget to the audit, they have complete control and accountability with many less mistakes. So again, the long term reality is it just frees up time and money and people and energy to focus on education.
K-12TD: How can schools prepare for a smooth transition from their old purchasing system to an “all-in-one” cloud-based purchasing platform?
I can only talk about ours. But basically, it’s effortless. We have a program called Quick Start Advantage. We know that people in school districts are already overworked, they don’t like to make changes, they don’t have time to learn new things, so we set it all up for them to mirror their process of purchasing. The main difference is, the person who starts the process, instead of handwriting a requisition, they just type it in. From that point on, everybody does the jobs they already do, but they all save time in doing it. They have at their fingertips everything they need because it’s cloud based. They can do it wherever they are. The transition is one where within days the business managers and administrators and everyone is laughing and saying ‘I can’t believe we used to suffer.’ That’s how effortless it is to transfer over.
K-12TD: How do you see digital purchasing platforms progressing in the future in regards to more schools implementing them? Do you see them taking over as the new up-and-coming technology for schools to use to make their purchasing decisions?
Part of the problem is the present purchasing processes are so horrible, they’re systemic. People think that there’s nothing you can do about it and they think that they have to live with this. The way we look at it is, we can immediately remove the problem. Where school districts don’t have budgets for new things, our solution is free to them, there’s no cost for it. So as far as we’re concerned, any school district, without spending any money and almost no time, can switch over to this process, have all of their people trained on it, and can immediately start it. What we’re doing is we’re constantly looking at every part of the purchasing process, because our mission is to eliminate time and cost so districts have more time and money to invest in teaching. So we’re continually looking at every step of the purchasing process to see where we can cut out more time. So where is it going to go in the future? As far as we’re concerned, we’re every day finding ways to replace the time they’re spending on purchasing, to free them up. That’s where I see it going.
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