BI could save Sydney Uni $40 million

Beverley Head
Thursday, 15 December 2011 15:00

Business IT - Technology

A business intelligence system installed in the procurement department at the University of Sydney has uncovered $40 million worth of potential savings.

It should be music to the University's ears as just last month it warned that it planned to cut 340 jobs and $28 million from its non salary budget after it failed to meet income growth expectations.

Harry Banga, the director of procurement services for the University, said that given the heavily discounted price that the university paid for the SAS supplied BI system the return on investment was almost immediate. The value of the contract between SAS and the university has not been revealed.

Mr Banga said that traditionally the; 'University sector is thought of as a nuisance by industry because it is hard to deal with. It is not a customer of choice and highly exploitable.'

However he said that more than $10 billion worth of goods and services was sold into the sector each year.

This he said made universities ripe for procurement overhauls in order to identify savings. Arriving at the University three years ago from the NSW government sector where he also held a procurement role, Mr Banga said that he had been keen to introduce evidence based procurement processes rather than opinion based processes.

'Once you can put the data on the table no-one can dispute it. Procurement 101 is to look at your spending analytics.'

He said that the first task was to work with SAS to collect and clean data from the university's general ledger in order to get a clear view of the university's suppliers. That revealed a total of 296,000 line items and 33,000 suppliers.