(STL.News) When a university needs to outfit a lecture hall with new video equipment or upgrade a campus recording studio, the process can eat up months of staff time — drafting a request for proposals, vetting suppliers, negotiating pricing, then repeating the process for the next purchase. For procurement teams already stretched thin, that’s time they don’t have.
It’s a problem more higher ed institutions are solving by joining forces rather than going it alone.
The Case for Cooperative Purchasing
Cooperative purchasing organizations pool the buying power of hundreds or thousands of institutions to negotiate contracts that any member can use — no individual bidding process required. E&I Cooperative Services, a nonprofit purchasing cooperative built specifically for education, is one of the larger players in this space, offering member institutions access to more than 260 competitively solicited contracts spanning everything from lab supplies to office furniture to AV equipment suppliers.
The value isn’t just theoretical. E&I scores each of its contracts using what it calls a Total Economic Benefit (TEB) — a metric that combines cost reduction, cost avoidance, and incentives or rebates into a single estimate of how much a contract is worth to a member institution. It’s a way of putting a number on what’s often a hard-to-quantify benefit: staff time saved by not reinventing the wheel every time something needs to be purchased.
A Real-World Example
UNC Greensboro, a public research university with more than 20,000 students, has been an E&I member for over a decade. According to Michael Logan, the university’s Director of Purchasing & Contracts, the process is straightforward: before going out to bid on a purchase, the procurement team checks state contracts first, then checks whether E&I already has something in place.
“It’s a no-brainer for a higher ed institution to take advantage of what E&I offers,” Logan said. “They are here to help you with a large portfolio of contracts that you begin using immediately. As a procurement professional, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”
UNC Greensboro currently uses more than 15 E&I contracts, and one of its biggest is B&H, one of the industry’s top AV equipment suppliers used for campus production, classroom, and broadcast needs. Under E&I’s Economic Benefit Model, that contract carries a documented TEB in the range of 7.0–11.0% — a concrete estimate of the combined savings a member institution can expect to see, beyond just the sticker price on equipment.
Why the Model Matters Beyond the Discount
For procurement officers, the appeal of a TEB-scored contract isn’t only the number itself — it’s what backs it up. E&I’s model draws on baseline cost comparisons, historical purchasing data, competitive intelligence, and vendor benchmarking to arrive at each contract’s benefit range, giving institutions something more defensible than a vendor’s own pricing claims when justifying a purchase internally.
That matters for public institutions in particular, which often face added layers of compliance and board scrutiny before a major purchase gets approved. Having a documented, third-party benefit estimate — rather than just a discount code — can shorten that internal conversation considerably.
The Bigger Picture
As higher ed budgets tighten and procurement teams are asked to do more with fewer resources, cooperative purchasing models are becoming less of a niche tactic and more of a standard playbook. For an AV equipment upgrade, a furniture order, or a campus-wide technology rollout, the math is often the same: institutions that check a cooperative contract first, before starting a solo RFP process, tend to save both money and staff hours they can redirect elsewhere.
For universities weighing where their next purchase should come from, that’s a question worth asking before drafting a single bid.
