PairSoft Helps Concorde Career College Improve Procurement Oversight

The Client

Concorde Career Colleges specializes in healthcare education and has been training medical professionals for nearly 50 years. Concorde Career College has 17 campuses in eight different states and continues to grow.

The Challenge

Manual Process. Excess Spending.

Concorde Career College had a highly manual procurement process using spreadsheets, e-mail, and paper requisitions to track requisitions and purchases. This process led to confusion and ultimately, overspending. Due to a growing number of medical and classroom equipment purchases, Concorde needed a more automated and auditable procurement process. It was essential to find a better way for each facility to manage purchases, streamlining the procurement process and reducing costs.

Requirements – Realtime Product Costs. Increased Purchase Capabilities

Key requirements for the procurement solution included PunchOut capabilities. PunchOut is a standard for ecommerce websites with the unique ability to communicate directly with a procurement system through cXML, returning a pending purchase order back to the buyer so they don’t need to enter product information into the procurement system. PunchOut promotes consistency in matching Purchase Orders against Invoices that is difficult to maintain as products change and update.

The Solution

PairSoft Requisition and Procurement utilizing PunchOut capabilities

Concorde Career College decided to implement PairSoft Requisition, Purchasing, and PunchOut for their purchasing needs.

Concorde selected the PairSoft PunchOut module to allow electronic product selection and ordering from approved catalogs to preferred suppliers. Rebecca Oxley, Purchasing Manager noted, “Before PunchOut, purchase orders and invoices never matched, due to the constantly changing products and cost of medical equipment. PunchOut has allowed us to have a real time platform to capture the current cost.”

In order to teach new employees how to use PairSoft, Concorde Career College uses customized training guides. They also use a meeting site to let new employees at different locations shadow the purchasing process remotely. Concorde Career College now has 81 users of PairSoft throughout their 17 locations.

The Results

Since the implementation Concorde Career College has seen the benefits of PairSoft. Oxley said, “It helps capture the true audit, approval process, and visibility.” PunchOut was the biggest factor in achieving accuracy, as the catalog stays current and up-to-date with new product features and pricing. If the product changes after the initial request is submitted, the system will automatically update—avoiding confusion, inaccuracies and reducing overspending.

Because of the scalability of PairSoft, as Concorde Career Colleges continues to grow, they will be able to continue to use all of the solution’s capabilities.

Measures of Success

Concord Career Colleges Now Has:

• Real time product cost insight
• Streamlined procurement processes
• Increased purchase visibility
• Requisition tracking and approval
• Reduction in procurement spending